The Ties That Bind
Sussex Life|May 2018

Ditchling-based Annabelle Thorpe has used her background as a travel journalist to great effect in her intriguing ‘holiday noir’, What Lies Within

Jenny Mark-Bell
The Ties That Bind

Five years since Brighton novelist Julia Crouch coined the term ‘domestic noir’, another Sussex writer is staking her claim to a hitherto-unplumbed area of mystery: the holiday noir. Annabelle Thorpe, who recently returned to live in Sussex after years in London, has set her second novel, What Lies Within, in the ex-pat community of Marrakech.

Annabelle is a travel journalist who feels that her job allows her to “peek behind the curtain” of famous destinations, gaining an insight denied to those of us who go to spend a starry-eyed weekend. “There’s a version that most people see when they go on holiday and there’s a version you see if you’re in the industry – you get to look around the backs of hotels, talk to the tourism officials about what they’re worried about, and talk to locals about how they feel about the new big hotel and whether they are getting jobs from it. I want to write about places as they really are,” she says.

This story is from the May 2018 edition of Sussex Life.

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This story is from the May 2018 edition of Sussex Life.

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