Jemima Wallace
Author Jemima Wallace is really aunt and niece team, Gerry Cameron and Germaine Stafford. Gerry (the old one) really does live in Scotland while Germaine lives in Italy, but after a few months of their working together, Jemima began to develop a whole personality of her own. She knows how to do everything Gerry and Germaine don’t: she’s super-efficient, never fails to write 5,000 words a day, seldom has to change her first drafts, runs at least 5k a day and can literally tie herself in knots during her Bikram yoga sessions. All this while Gerry and Gem are curled up on the sofa with a bacon sandwich and a glass of red wine. (Though Jemima really needs to remember that if it weren’t for the excess of red wine that fateful night, she wouldn’t even exist.) She lives between her two homes, an Edwardian terraced flat in Edinburgh and a small cottage overlooking Loch Mhor on the quiet side of Loch Ness. Although she has never married, for many years Jemima has been in a stable relationship with a gentleman whose high public profile has led to the decision to keep his identity private. Her partner has business interests in St. Bart’s, the Maldives and various European capitals meaning the couple is seldom at home.

Gerry Cameron, aunt of Germaine Stafford, is just a smidgen older than her niece (a mere decade), but obviously much wiser. She now lives in a tiny Ayrshire village, and sometimes in France, but lived quite near to Loch Ness for quite a long time. Her widely inaccurate memories make the basis for Jemima Wallace’s sense of place. It is quite obvious that Jemima listens in on the long, rambling Skype conversations and monitors the sparkling wit of the Skype texts between aunt and niece and thus constructs her novels. As long as she gets a cut of the loot, this bothers Gerry not.

Germaine Stafford has lived in Scotland, Paris, the South of France, and the north of Italy but now seems to have settled somewhere on the Amalfi Coast where she has found the perfect combination of good food and wine, warm weather and the very best of friends. Here, she lives with four cats and the real life Martino Oliva and spends too much time on Skype with her elderly auntie, whose faculties, she is dismayed to report, appear to be dwindling rapidly.