Hello, my name is Charlotte Milne and I am a writer just beginning the tricky website stuff. Welcome, and if you get lost on my site, please be patient, sympathetic and helpful, because I am lost too, even though it is virtually empty.

I like to read a good plot, well rounded real-life characters with real-life problems, but I also like eventual happy outcomes even if there are tears on the way, so I write what I like to read. I am a romantic at heart. If this appeals, then hopefully you’ll enjoy my books.

My first novel, Dolphin Days, is a contemporary romance set in Greece—where we built a house 26 years ago—London and Scotland. My three favourite places. As we settled into our Greek island paradise, I started to scribble the beginnings of this story, and went on scribbling intermittently for the next twenty years. It took my wonderful editor Hilary Johnson some time to reduce it to manageable proportions! Dolphin Days was published in December 2017 and can be obtained here where you can also Look Inside.

Both my husband and I are Scots and when Covid permits we retreat to a cottage in Wester Ross where I can write and research without the distractions of normal life—except feeding the hungry man. Wester Ross is the setting for my second novel, Come In From the Cold, which has its beginnings in 1942 with the convoys supplying Russia from Loch Ewe in the Scottish highlands. A wartime romance and murder resolve in a contemporary love story. Come In From The Cold was published in 2019 and can be obtained here

My third novel is called Colour Blind, and is a contemporary story set in Hampshire about a flawed but feisty woman who has Synesthete Syndrome (a positive!) and Retinitis Pigmentosa (a negative!). I hope to publish this year, 2021.

After thirty years in rural Hampshire, I now live with my patient, supportive husband in a retirement village near Southampton, about halfway between our son and daughter and seven grandchildren who like the rest of our weird world I have not physically seen for months. It is in many ways a relief to no longer have to garden two acres or try to keep an Elizabethan farmhouse from disintegrating around our ears, but I miss it too!

I grew up in lots of places, being a naval daughter, but home was always a fabulous house, buried in the woods above the Tweed valley in the Borders of Scotland. My grandparents lived in the same house which I thought was wonderful, but now I wonder if my mother thought the same! It seemed to be a childhood of summer sun and winter snow and ice, of rough ponies, cats, dogs, the river and huge amounts of risk. My parents just let us fly! I have three elder brothers who I adored and worshipped, and who I now just love to bits, along with my sisters-in-law. How many people are lucky enough to have that sort of family! One of the best times was as a teenager when my father was posted to Malta. We lived in Fort St Angelo, in the middle of Valetta harbour, and there is definitely a novel to be set there. I just haven’t written it yet.

I have never, to my certain knowledge, ever been bored. The world inside my head is a seething mass of characters and conversations. I see people passing by and give them much more exciting lives than they could possibly have. I’ve always written stories (mounds of loose manuscripts and all the pages are muddled up) and as I’m now 75, there are lots of them, those that haven’t been burnt or shredded.