Ever since my teens, i've love vampire novels and I vowed to write one myself someday. And then I went to Oxford and I thought that, with it's beautiful buildings, weird old traditions and fascinating people, it would be a great setting for a novel.
I wrote about two chapters of a wonderfully pretentious, literary novel about Oxford, and then I suddenly thought "you know what this is missing? Sex and Vampires." And so I started again from scratch and the Cavaliers was borh.
So basically, The Cavaliers is set at Oxford University and it's about an elite society there. All the members are rich, charming, intelligent and good looking - but what no one knows is that they are also vampires. And let's be clear - they are proper vampires. They drink human blood, they kill and they ruthlessly seduce anyone they take a fancy too.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the Bullingdon Club or the Piers Gaveston, but it's based on that sort of thing. The Current Prime Minister, Treasurer and Mayor of London were all members of the Bullingdon Club, so I thought it would be funny to create a society of vampires that are running the country.
The main character is a girl called Harriet French. Apart from the fact that when she was a baby, her father died and her mother walked out, she's a normal girl from an average background.
When she gets accepted into Oxford University, the oldest university in the English speaking world, she's excited and nervous in equal parts. She can't wait to live in a 15th century building, to learn from some of the greatest minds of their generation and, let's face it, to meet some hot, posh boys.
Once she's there, she loves it. The place is beautiful, the lessons are interesting and she makes some great new friends. But then she meets Tom Flyte. He's good looking, he's incredibly posh, he likes the same books and music as her and she just feels a total connection. What she doesn't realise is that he was born around 1900 and first attended Oxford in the 1920s.
As far as the Cavaliers go, that's really quite young. Harriet's other potential love interest, George Stewart, was born in the early 1600s and fought in the English Civil War.
As the year progresses, Harriet has a lot more to deal with than just passing exams and fitting in. Being torn between two deadly vampires is bad enough, but then she realises that a)someone is killing off the Cavaliers and b)that at the end of the year, the society is going to massacre loads of the most glamourous and popular students. She wants to stop both of these things, but how can she fight back against a society that have the police, the government and the media on side, and a society she's rapidly falling in love with.