When I began writing Love & Freedom I decided that American Honor Sontag had come to Brighton, England, searching for her English mother who had left when Honor was a baby.

I didn’t immediately realise that it would represent a new start – like her, I believed she was just taking time out, a four-month odyssey that would allow her a break from a bad situation in her Connecticut home town of Hamilton Drives. Although, I suppose, having taken such a radical step as to take off without even telling her family where she was going, it was logical that she was ripe for change.