In The Pink - Tapa dura

When two city girls embark on an afternoon of idle window-shopping in Worcestershire and end up buying a horse their lives swerve gloriously off course. Within weeks they have abandoned their careers in London in favour of a rural life that is anything but idyllic. Their dreams of sunny rural bliss, preferably funded by a landed local bachelor, are quick to shatter - along with their collarbones and credit ratings. Thrown into a hair-raising world where the horses have cocaine habits and the locals have developed their own alternative to Viagra, Molly Watson and her sister Annabel are soon nursing their chilblains in an isolated, rain-lashed cottage where the hot water doesn't work, the rats run riot and the mucking out is never ending. Yet with only their romantic aspirations for the Hunt Ball to sustain them, the sisters somehow make their way through the maelstrom of ancient neighbourly feuds, lecherous blacksmiths and terrible television reception that is country life to hilarious effect. To produce this lacerating comic account of herself, her family and her year in a rural world threatened with extinction Molly endured constant sabotage attempts from her mother, the ridicule of her townie friends whenever she ventured back to London and routinely risked her neck trying to impress the horsey set of the Ledbury country. She still has the scars to prove it.

Molly Watson was born in Wales 28 years ago. The eldest of six children, she escaped first to a trading pit in the London Financial Futures Exchange and then to Oxford. After taking a degree in Modern History at Jesus College she was appointed the Evening Standard's correspondent in New York and lived in America for several years. Despite her best efforts she is currently living back at home in the Brecon Beacons with her parents and assorted siblings.