This novel Three and Six (working title) unfolds against the backdrop of the ‘Lady Chatterley’/Penguin landmark trial. In 1960, the planned publication of the unexpurgated story of the illicit affair between Lady Connie Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors - with the promise of mass distribution in a Penguin paperback priced at just 3s 6d - turned D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel into a cultural powder keg. The year before, in the United States, Barney Rossett of Grove Press, publisher of the first American unexpurgated edition, also aroused widespread controversy and a famous legal challenge. Both cases represented something far larger than the fate of a single book. They dramatically ‘outed’ the struggle between state control on the one hand and freedom of thought on the other. My novel's twin U.K. and U.S. story-lines explore the entangled forces of public morality, state intervention, the human imagination and the intimate life.

Awarded The 2016 British Library Eccles Award for a project-in-progress.