It’s the first question most people ask, and the hardest one for me to answer, because there’s no simple reply.

I usually interweave stories from two different times in the same book. Sometimes both those timelines are in the past, so I could answer that I write historical novels. Sometimes I mix present and past, so not purely historical, but still enough to say I’m a historical novelist. But there are times, very rarely, when one of my stories has stayed in the present, with only a reference or mystery that rises up out of the past… so, what then?

I could say I write mysteries—but then, too, the level of mystery in each book can vary, and what I write would fall more properly into the realm of old-fashioned suspense, which is hard to describe to a new-fashioned audience.

Some of my novels have touches of the paranormal—a ghost, or a psychic ability, things in the shadows. So when I’m asked what kind of novels I write, I could say I write fantasy. Only not all of my books have these elements woven in, so that’s not totally true.

I could say I write romance. I do, by the British definition of it, and there is, at the centre of all of my books, a love story. But however strong a driving force it may be, it remains only one part of my main character’s journey, meaning that my novels, in North America at least, are not considered romance, but fiction with romantic elements.

So you see my problem, when I’m asked that question.

Sometimes, I think it might be a problem of our modern age.

Looking at the writers I love best and whose books take up the most room on my own bookshelves, I’m not certain that I’d find it any easier to come up with a simple explanation of the kinds of stories they wrote, either.

Just to look at three:

Among her many novels, Daphne du Maurier wrote completely historical stories like Jamaica Inn, contemporary (for her time) mysteries like Rebecca, and forever put her mark on time travel with The House on the Strand. 

Mary Stewart, a master of such romantic suspense novels as Nine Coaches Waiting, sometimes blended paranormal elements into her work, as she did in Touch Not the Cat, and with The Crystal Cave launched her Merlin series of historical fantasy novels set in Arthurian Britain. 

And then of course there’s Nevil Shute, whose books include the dual-time, World War II-set classic A Town Like Alice, the uniquely haunting In the Wet, blending reincarnation with time travel to the future, and the post-apocalyptic On the Beach. 

Brilliant writers all… but where to shelve them in a modern bookstore? Mystery? History? Fantasy? Romance? They straddle all those genres, and can be contained by none.

The easiest of answers is to say that I’m a storyteller, but there is no “storyteller” shelf in any bookshop. And I realize having books divided into genres is important to the reader who is trying to find what they want, and needs to know what to expect when they pick up a novel. Whether in a library or bookshop, there is comfort in organization. 

I know this well. It’s in my genes. My father was an engineer. 

Our family moved so often for his work, we rarely lived in one place more than a few years. It was a pattern I continued through my adult life, until I finally married in my thirties. I’ve had so many homes in different cities, different countries, different continents, it’s been a constant feature of my own life that I never truly know where I belong. 

So perhaps it shouldn’t come as any great surprise that my books don’t belong to any single category, either.

Maybe, instead of trying to answer the question at all, I should take the advice of fellow writer Michael Connelly.

“I really don’t go for any kind of classifications,” he says. “I think the best thing you can do is keep your head down and write the story that you would like to read and let other people deal with that.”