Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist, born in her grandfather's rectory in Gloucestershire, she went to Oxford

and then to the foreign office before becoming a teacher. Her first books were historical romances.

It was not until 1987 that encouraged by her husband she wrote her first

contemporary novel The Choir. She's since written six more including the Rector's

wife and a Spanish lover becoming in the process one of this country's most successful

writers.

She deals in the everyday round of marriage, divorce and good and bad behavior and claims

to be a writer for the 90s. She says, I write about how much of

England lives. She is Joanna Trollope. What's different about the 90s, Joanna? Do we require

something different from our contemporary fiction than we required in the 80s?

I think the 90s are more sober.

I think if my novels had appeared 10 years ago at the beginning of the 80s,

they'd have sunk without trace.

Well, the choir did on its first appearance in 1987.

But this is the end of a century, you know, this is a reflective time and we've got over that rather greedy decade of the 80s.

The Thatcher decade. Yes, yes, that one.

So we're not in need of, are you saying, the blockbuster and the sexy

rumps and the mad dreams and dreams beyond avarice? Well, there'll always be a place for those.

We'll always fantasize about those, but those aren't in the forefront of our minds anymore because they don't seem to work any longer.

We've just had to become a bit more reflective.

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