A Thin Disguise

About the Book

Anne's first novel is fiction based on fact: the story of Catherine, an anorexic. Anne uses a lot of personal experiences in her work and though the subject matter is serious, she lets her unquenchable sense of humour and optimism shine through.

Catherine's anorexia started at school when Luke, the boy she fancied, called her fat. Now a grown woman with a young daughter, she thinks she has it under control.

Suddenly she finds herself working for Luke, and discovers she is still in love with him. Can their relationship work when emotions in the office start to boil over?

About the Author

Anne Barrett was born in the bustling suburbs of North London in 1959, moved to Bushey in 1967 and now lives in the relative calm of Leighton Buzzard in Bedfordshire. She has been writing for well over 30 years, experimenting with songs, plays, poetry, short stories and novels.

When she left school in 1976 she worked for nine years as a secretary and you could say she experimented with marriage too, first to a bass player, then to a computer programmer. In 1985 she went to college and became a programmer herself; two years later she passed three A-Levels and another O-Level, then finished with academia and started having children.

It was only once her children started school she could again concentrate on her writing. In January 1996 she won the Red House Short Story competition with Why, a study of the relationship between criminal and victim, and in October 1997 she won the Speakeasy Creative Writing Competition with A Piece of Paper, a futuristic story about two teenagers who find living together is more complicated than they thought.