A Little About Annie Cook
Annie Cook was born in Lancashire, England. She is the only child of her parents, who decided to emigrate to New Zealand a year after she was born. Her parent's decision to move to the other side of the world meant that she was taken her away from her grandparents and all of her extended family, and she found growing up in New Zealand to be a very isolating experience. She learned to read and write very early - even before she started school. Immersing herself in books and stories, and writing some of her own, gave her a 'place to be' and formed the foundation of her eventual emergence as an author of fiction.
Annie never enjoyed or felt like she 'fitted in' at school and she left as soon as she could, at the age of seventeen. Her first job was as a telephone exchange operator for the New Zealand Post Office, and she then went on to do various office administrative roles, before deciding to re-emigrate back to England in her twenties. She was able to reconnect with some of her extended family in Lancashire.
She went to University a little later in life, and eventually achieved a Master of Science in Forensic Psychology at Leicester University. Her specialisms were Forensic, Family, Developmental and Adolescent-Abnormal Psychology, and she worked in HM Prison Sevice (YOI), then alongside the police in North Yorkshire and in Nottingham, and then with the NHS in the Midlands. Annie worked primarily with young people and their families who were affected by addiction and caught up in the criminaj justice system.
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Annie has been married for 30 years to an engineer from New Zealand. The couple divide their time between the UK and their home in Southern Italy
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​WHAT IS ANNIE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW?
She is currently working on a connected series of eight novels; 'Stories With A Little Bit Of Magic.' These stories are aimed mostly at older women, as there are themes of menopause and family challenges, that run through them all.
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The stories are fictional, and all based around a little holiday cottage, squirreled away in a quiet corner of in the Lake District of England. 'Teapot Cottage' has a very special energy within its walls that helps people who are on different journeys of recovery from devastating, life-changing trauma. Their time at the cottage helps them to come to terms with what's happened in their lives, and find a new way forward, often in the most surprising and unforeseen ways! Characters overlap and keep popping up, just to remind readers that each time they visit 'Torley town,' they meet up again with friends they've met before. There's a lot of kindness in Torley, and a lot of fun to be had, too!
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Annie says:
"It's tremendous fun, writing these stories of hope and recovery from trauma, and the realisation that behind every dark cloud is a silver lining that's sometimes so bright it hurts the eyes. But it always gladdens the heart. Most of the people who arrive at Teapot Cottage in a 'screaming heap' end up in a far better place, even though it might be one they never imagined for themselves. The cottage has its own ideas about where people should be going, and what they should be doing, and that is always surprising me, as the author! There's many a time when these characters will take on a life of their own, charge off in a different direction than what I had in mind, and I feel like I'm running to catch up with them, saying; 'hold on a minute! This wasn't what I had planned for you!' That's how I know these characters are authentic. They simply won't do as they are told! But usually, if I let them develop in the ways they want to, the stories are always much better for it!"
The first five stories in the Teapot Cottage series; (No Small Change, The Power of Notes and Spells, When It's Meant To Happen, Ruin, Reins and Redemption and The Stuff You Fail To Notice are now all available on Amazon and other book platforms, with the fifth novel in the series. Book Six in the series (The Choice Between Safe and Brave) is set for publication in April 2025 - just in time for Easter!​
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Annie has also written two separate novels, which are not part of the series. A Moral Swerve is written in a very different (and much darker) genre, but it does put a little 'meat on the bones' of one of the main characters in Book Three of the series. Readers are recommended to read A Moral Swerve between Books two and Three of the Teapot Cottage series. A second alter-genre novel - Thicker Than Water - offers the back-story to Adie Bostock, the central enduring character in the Teapot Cottage Series, and is available now.
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In My Own Words . . .
​I've always loved to read and write, and I've grown up with a big appetite for
adventure and a sense of 'if you can imagine it, you can find a way to do it!'
That probably stems from my early influences of going on adventures with
Mary Tourtel's and Alfred Bestall's beloved Rupert Bear and Bill Badger, and
then with Enid Blyton's Famous Five!
When I wasn't drifting over Nutwood in a hot air balloon with Rupert, or wandering through the ruins of Kirrin Castle with Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy, other characters were inspiring and captivating me with equally vivid escapades. I adored Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and the sheer brilliance of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. I still can't look at a free-standing wardrobe without imagining what could lie behind it!
I still have almost all of my favourite books from childhood, and I love to spend time in musty, dusty old second-hand book stores trying to find the ones I somehow lost along the way!
I've worked as a psychologist, in the prison service, in the private sector and and with the NHS, and I now run my own business helping people with long-term insomnia to sleep properly again. I'm married to an engineer who also loves adventure, and we're both keen motorcyclists. We both grew up in New Zealand, but now divide our time between the UK and Italy.
For most of my life I've been too busy to devote REAL time to writing, but I've always written stories. Lately I've been feeling ever more compelled to paint pictures with words that might spark the interest of others who'd like to escape for a while too, from the normal daily grind.
Sometimes, my characters take on a life of their own, and set off at a gallop, and I end up feeling like I'm running along behind them, trying to catch them and regain control of where they're going! It can be a bit frustrating at times, when I feel a story going in a different direction than where I first intended, but mostly its exciting, because it usually means we all end up in an even more interesting place.
Few things are better than curling up with a good book and "running away from home" for a while, and what I offer through my work is a 'private portal' - a temporary, exclusive escape - to a fascinating place filled with positive people and interesting situations where, "with the help of a little bit of magic," almost anything can happen!
So watch this space, because stories of love and magic are on their way, and I hope that when they arrive, you'll enjoy them. I hope that reading them will captivate you as much as writing them has captivated me.
Annie
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