Best-selling author Giselle Green has drawn inspiration for her books from living more than 35 years in the Towns .

She has just had her seventh romantic novel published and, having taken four years to complete it, she describes it as her most challenging to date.

The Girl You Forgot features emotionally gripping storylines about family relationships in a complex structure.

The 59-year-old worked as a safety officer, at Unilever's head office in London, before her big breakthrough in 2007 with the publication of Pandora's Box.

She has always loved writing and a highlight was to get a contract with publisher Harper Collins in the same year.

The Walderslade resident's debut novel won the Romantic Novelists' Association (RNA) New Writer's Award in 2008.

Her third, A Sister's Gift, achieved best-selling number one status on Amazon kindle, while her fifth, Dear Dad, was shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Novel of the Year.

A qualified astrologer, she has also written A Writer's Guide to the Zodiac which was published in 2005.

The mum of six boys said of her latest book: "It took two years of stops and false starts and another two of actual writing to get there – four years in total.

"However, the idea which inspired it remained the same throughout. It came from an article I read, a personal account written by a journalist who’d studied neuroscience at university.

"One day, his class were discussing how a tutor, diagnosed with a brain tumour, had walked into the sea rather than risk losing all his life’s memories which went to make up ‘who he was’.

"A classmate had made the observation the tutor would still have been ‘himself’ even if without all his memories…and that set me thinking: how much of our identity is gleaned from our memories and stories we tell about ourselves.

"How much of it would endure, even if we lost those memories?

"In essence, the story is really about the soul. It’s about identity. It’s about what makes us who we are, above and beyond all the outward trappings of who we appear to be, to the outside world.

"It’s about a girl who struggles to help her man reconnect with his lost identity so that he will reconnect with her.

"It’s a story about truth and about the lies we sometimes tell ourselves in order to keep our fragile sense of who we are, intact… until the day comes when my protagonists can’t do that anymore.

"I can’t help but feel the issues in the book are very live and relevant at this moment. With so many of us having seen much of our daily routine, basically, much of our lives, stripped away, leaving us bare… what endures?

"How much will we recognise ourselves in the weeks and months to come? How many of us will grasp the courage to move beyond despair – or even mere acceptance – and take the golden kernel of all that we are, into the years that lie ahead?

"I feel excited about what lies ahead in my journey with my new publisher, Boldwood, and grateful to all the readers who’ve patiently stuck with me and are waiting to see what I came to at the end of this journey."

Two of her novels, A Sister's Gift and Dear Dad, were set in one of her favourite places, Rochester.

Giselle, who is married to husband Eliott, 62, said: "I love the place, it has such energy.

"Dear Dad featured a flat which I based on the top floor of the Francis Iles art gallery in the High Street."

Her new publisher is Boldwood Books and her latest book came out this month.

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