SALLY HEPWORTH: 'NOVELS WILL ALWAYS BE MY FIRST LOVE'

The Family Next Door author talks TV adaptations and how inspiration comes from surprising places

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Can you give us the elevator pitch for your latest novel, Mad Mabel?

It's about an 81-year-old curmudgeon living in a small street in Melbourne who finds her nemesis neighbour dead. And because of that a whole lot of secrets about her past come out and we are thrust back to the 1950s, to the time where she was a teenager and had the name "Mad Mabel".

Where did the spark of the idea come from?

At an event for my last book, Darling Girls, I met an older woman and the first thing she said was, “I’m going to kill my next door neighbour!” I had been talking about murdering people during the event so I asked, “How are you going to do it?” because I like to store up these things for novels and she said,