A new novel based on the headlines-and-deadlines world of newspapers is due to hit the shelves this week.

Freelance journalist Emma Lee-Potter’s latest book Taking Sides is published on Thursday.

It tells the story of journalist Juliette Ward, who’s fed up with London life. Her work deadlines are impossible, she doesn’t see enough of her young son and her marriage isn’t exactly idyllic either.

But when she uproots her family to a cottage in the Lake District she discovers that adjusting to rural life isn’t quite as straightforward as she’d imagined.

And just as she persuades her family to move to the country, her DJ husband Joe promptly lands the breakfast show on a new London radio station.

She knows he’d be mad to turn down his big break. But she hates the thought of swapping her stable marriage for a long-distance relationship. Big city versus country idyll? If only things were that simple…

Emma Lee-Potter is a journalist who spent ten years on the Evening Standard, Sunday Express and Today before becoming a freelance writer based in Oxfordshire. She has written columns for the Oxford Mail and Birmingham Evening Mail.

She said: “The three novels I’ve written so far all have a newspaper background.

“I get lots of my inspiration from working as a local newspaper reporter – my first job was on the Mid-Devon Advertiser in Newton Abbot, Devon.

“I know there are loads of novels about journalists but few of them seemed to quite capture what it was like on the road – the doorstepping people for days on end, the constant terror that a rival newspaper’s going to get an angle you’ve missed, the being rung in the middle of the night and told to get somewhere RIGHT NOW.”

She said the biggest difference was adjusting to the length of a novel but she added: “Keeping the momentum going is quite a challenge. But then unlike a news story where you rely solely on the facts and getting quotes from everyone involved, when you’re writing a novel you can let your imagination run riot.”

Taking Sides is published in paperback by Piatkus Books, price £5.99. Her first two novels, Hard Copy and Moving On, are also published by Piatkus.

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