Who says a debut novelist has to be in their twenties? Deborah Morgan's novels testify to the power of a second act

'Why did you write about that? We don’t speak about that'

Dear members — In her forties, Deborah Morgan had a revelation: the thing she was put on this earth to do was to write novels. And thank goodness she did. In her books, Morgan went on to show a side of this city that isn’t usually the stuff of literary fiction: domestic abuse, shoplifting, tenements, corporal punishment. This sounds like grim material — but in Morgan’s capable hands, these stories skew optimistic, even joyful. So how did Morgan begin to write? How did she juggle the rest of her life (motherhood and all) with her prose? And how does she think Liverpool’s changed since the 70s?

But first: the theft of £40,000 of cocaine leads to murder and Wirral Council’s big plan for redevelopment.