Amanda Brookfield was born in 1960 and educated at University College Oxford. Her passion for literature was fired by a sixth form love of E. M. Forster's Howard's End; she went on to do an optional thesis on Forster's work at Oxford. She began her career in advertising and then worked as a freelance journalist in Argentina. Drawing on her own experience of being part of a large, close family, her novel The Simple Rules of Love taps into the tangled web of emotions, insecurities and passions familiar to us all. Emotionally intelligent, with a voice that is both poignant and perceptive, Amanda is a writer of contemporary fiction of the highest calibre.

Picture: Chris Heads (Samantha Sutherland 07810-608-750)

Paperback Publication: 16th October 2008

If Life Begins at Forty, Charlotte doesn't feel she's off to a very good start. As if a recent divorce, a thwarted attempt to move house and a twelve year old son in trouble at school were not enough, the husband of her closest friend Theresa starts to show rather too much interest in her as a newly single woman.

No longer able to blame everything on a floundering marriage, Charlotte is forced to open her eyes and embark on an emotional journey into her past. Only when she has faced some challenging and revealing truths can she finally shed the unhappy skin she's become so comfortable in, and open up her life - and her heart - to all the promise and possibility that her future holds.

Is life, for Charlotte, about to begin at last...?