Deborah Moggach

DM 's literary career dates from the 1970s. By 2004 she had produced fifteen novels, a number of television screenplays, and two volumes of short stories, besides her journalistic output (reviews, essays, interviews). Her novels typically concern themselves with ordinary families whose lives fissure and fracture under pressure from some unexpected event. (She says: I like setting up a seemingly happy family and then planting a stick of dynamite in the corner of the room. Light the touch paper and watch what happens.) Yet often some kind of restoration, perhaps in radically altered form, provides a kind of happy resolution. She often writes about the moral and emotional implications of some issue in the news, like child abuse or surrogate motherhood: the loss of children, interpreted in various different ways, is one of her favourite subjects. Yet nothing could be less like a simple case study than the resulting novels.