Stuff in the Attic

The question I’m asked more than any other is why this website features only four of my books when it doesn’t take much poking around on the Web to unearth quite a long and yellowing backlist. The short answer is that they’re all out of print. But since so many readers have been kind enough to enquire, here’s the lowdown.

I was first published in 1986. My debut novel, The Man For The Job was very generously reviewed, but then life came along and got in the way and as I urgently needed to earn a living I turned my hand to writing light non-fiction. A Parents’ Survival Guide was the bestseller that freed me to quit the day job. It was followed by A Marriage Survival Guide, Teenagers: A Family Survival Guide, and a book on etiquette called Getting It Right. I rather squeezed the pips out of the genre until my publishers said, “No more, thanks all the same.”

Which is when I returned to novel writing.

The Ten O’clock Horses was published in 1995 and I always think of it as my first novel even though it was actually my second. It is the story of Ronnie Glover, a man struggling to escape the frustrations of his narrow, suburban world without hurting the people he loves.

Perfect Meringues appeared in 1996 and is the only one of my novels that is remotely autobiographical. It’s the HRT-fuelled rant of a middle-aged single mother, set in the world of TV cook shows. A sort of Roseanne meets Martha Stewart.

The Dress Circle was published in 1997 and is, I think, my personal favourite. It is also, so far, my only novel to get within striking distance of being made into a movie. Alas, it was not to be. It’s the story of a happy marriage rocked by a husband who steps out of the transvestite closet on the eve of his daughter’s wedding. Publicising it involved appearing on daytime TV shows in the company of married transvestites and their wives and was the greatest fun I’ve ever had promoting a book.

Dog Days, Glenn Miller Nights was published in 1998. Set in the East End of London, Birdie Gibbs tells her story of growing old in a world that neither knows nor cares what you did when you were in your prime and Hitler was at the door.

These titles are all now out of print but available at bargain prices to anyone willing to search.

This is also probably the place to clarify that I am not the Laurie Graham, the former Scribner’s editor, who wrote Rebuilding The House, nor Laurie Graham, the investigative journalist, who wrote On The Line At Subaru-Isuzu.

Oh, and neither am I the medal-winning Canadian downhill skier.

I’m the other Laurie Graham.