My novels tend to focus on the inner lives of their characters - those hidden parts of their minds which even their nearest and dearest are unaware of - and on the dilemmas of people who feel they are trying to live in two different worlds at once.

I am intrigued by questions about how people see themselves. In this fast-changing world, what gives us our sense of belonging, or not belonging, to any place or group or culture?

As well as writing, I sometimes paint a little, which helps me to untangle my mind when it gets stuck. Some of my paintings are about my struggles with writing. You can see them on my website.

Yvonne Jerrold

A Case of Wild Justice? is my second published novel.

It was inspired by seeing my mother's helpless rage after she was burgled three times by youngsters while she was alone in the house. Faced with the boldness of the intruders, and their smug confidence that they could get away with it simply because she was old and frail, she longed to be able to fight back, but she felt powerless and humiliated.

This story (which is not about my mother) takes that suppressed rage to its logical conclusion...

My first published novel was Silent People: Hearing the Call of the Dodder, which is about one young woman's struggle to reconcile opposing views of the world.

The unpredictable river in the story was inspired by the Dodder river which flows down the Wicklow mountains and through the city of Dublin where I grew up. However, the dodder of the title refers, not to the river, but to the dodder people, an ancient hidden race that still survives at the edges of our modern civilization.

Their name comes from the dodder plant, a leafless and virtually rootless, parasitic vine. According to an old Indian proverb: he who finds the root of the dodder 'will become possessed of boundless wealth and of the power of invisibility'.

Although Silent People is a work of fiction, the idea of a hidden race of humans is not so far-fetched. The discovery of Homo Floriensis, on the Island of Flores, has aroused speculation that a race of small people may have lived alongside Homo Sapiens. It has even been suggested that some may still survive in remote parts of Indonesia.