Born and brought up near Winchester, you might say that Martha was born with an entire silver dinner service in her mouth. Her father is an investment banker, and Martha describes her mother as ‘an aristocrat who wouldn’t ever have had to work if she hadn’t wanted to’, though as it happens she always has and she now runs a T’ai Chi school that she set up herself. The family home is an eighteen-bedroom Hampshire mansion. The grounds are regularly used by touring companies for open-air productions of Shakespeare and opera. Martha’s mother is passionate about the arts, and always wanted her only daughter to do something creative. An ex-pupil of Villiers, the exclusive girls’ boarding school in Surrey, she sent Martha there too, in keeping with family tradition. ‘I love Villiers,’ says Martha. ‘If I ever have a daughter, that’s where she’ll go.’ On a novelist’s income? I ask. ‘I’m lucky,’ Martha admits. ‘Money isn’t a problem for me, because of my family. But it annoys me when people assume my life’s always been easy because of this. Financial problems aren’t the only kind. I know other writers who are always flat broke, but they’re happier in themselves than I am.’ Isn’t she happy, then? Most people would be, with a two-book deal from one of the country’s finest publishers and an ecstatically reviewed first novel already out. ‘I worry compulsively about the next book—I still don’t know what it’s going to be about,’ Martha admits. ‘What if it’s no good? I’m scared all I’ll do is write another version of my first book except worse. I could end up being a very public failure by the time I’m thirty-five.’ I ask her about her love life—does she have an Adam Sands equivalent? ‘If you’re asking if I’ve got a boyfriend, the answer’s no,’ she says. ‘But in the past I’ve been through hell as a result of loving a man too much, so in that sense the novel’s autobiographical. See what I mean?’ She smiles. ‘There are some situations where money’s no use whatsoever.’