Come and Tell Me Some Lies is my first novel, autobiographical and thinly disguised it is my version of my childhood.

My father George Barker was a classic wild poet. He had five wives and fifteen children and was sometimes mad and bad, sometimes wise and wonderful.

My mother Elspeth Barker wrote her novel "O Caledonia" and had it published just weeks before he died. Both of them have always been larger than life for me, and I find it hard to unscramble the myths of my childhood from my true memories.

Maybe there is no difference in the end.