By Bread Alone
by Sarah-Kate Lynch

List Price: $23.95
Pages: 368
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0446531294
Publisher: Warner Books

Ever since I was a kid I have loved writing stories. I remember I had a notebook when I was about nine into which I wrote in very heavy pencil the story of a young girl adopted by an elderly farming couple and reduced to a life of virtual servitude and cruelty until she meets a happy ending. It was Pollyanna mixed with Anne of Green Gables, to the letter I fear, and I was so heavy on the eraser every second page had a hole clear through it.

At high school, though, I specialized in sciences as I thought I would be a vet but in my last year the dissection of a rabbit caused the contents of my stomach to become dis-lodged. It occurred to me then, for the first time, that vets don't just deal with the cute and furry outsides of animals, but the dark and goopy insides too. And so I became a journalist.

For nearly two decades I worked for radio stations and magazines in New Zealand, Sydney and London until the pressure of not making things up finally got to me and I decided to abandon any attempt to repeat the facts and concentrate solely on fiction.

I had been working as a foodwriter for a newspaper at the time which was how the subject of cheese came so closely to my attention and armed with the reality of how grass one days ends up being smeared on crackers, I filled in the gaps and ended up with Blessed Are the Cheesemakers.

I live in Queenstown which is a small lakeside town in the mountains of New Zealand's South Island. However, one of the joys of being a writer is that you are by no means confined to your own neighbourhood and so I set my books in places in where I want to go and hang out for a while. Hence, the Cheesemakers are in West Cork, and the characters in my next book hail from the eccentric English countryside and the banks of the Dordogne River in France. Next stop, Venice and Manhattan!

As a child, I loved AA Milne and devoured the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis. I still marvel, to this day, about all of that action taking place on the other side of the wardrobe in the blink of an eye. Now there's a storyline!

These days, I like all things forensic, a la Patricia Cornwell, and I have just finished the latest Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted. I've read all her books. Before that I read The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood of whom I have been a bit wary up until now but I liked that book and now I am reading, and loving, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon.

I love biographies too and still on my bookcase is the wonderful biography of comedian Billy Connolly, Billy, by his wife Pamela Stephenson, plus a host of books about cheese and sourdough bread, the subject of my next novel.

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