What is love? That was the most searched for phrase on Google in 2012. It has dropped to third place in 2014. What is Ebola and ALS claimed first and second spots in 2014.

But it remains an interesting question, doesn’t it? What is love? It fills me with hope in our turbulent times that people are still searching for love. It confirms what I have always suspected; that no matter the person’s behaviour, at the bottom of everything is the fact that we all just want to be loved for who we really are. We want acceptance and the perfect feeling of ‘home’ that only love can give us.

It is also the reason for so many romance novels. Not that romance is the only form of love. But it is the one we seem to strive for the most.

In my debut novel, The Healing Touch, the heroine, Isabelle, loves three men deeply, but in very different ways. Based on real events in my life, writing The Healing Touch, was a deeply cathartic experience. And I’m delighted that readers have already been in contact to confirm that reading it has helped them, too. I could not ask for more than that.

At the beginning of The Healing Touch, we find Isabelle:

Isabelle switched off the tablet. The book was finished. She simply had to write this book.

She had no idea what category or genre it would come under, but she knew one hundred percent, that it would help others in a similar position. Even if it did not, it had helped her, healed her, made life make sense again.

After her colleague, dear friend, and much loved soul-brother had died unexpectedly, aged only thirty-three, her life had changed forever. She had felt so low, and life was utterly without point, that she had seriously contemplated checking out, not necessarily to be with him, but what was the point of it all?

Of course, the book could not exist without the people in her life who affected her day-to-day existence so profoundly.

James, who had transitioned where she could not follow, had, before he left, inspired her to strive for new horizons in friendship and in her career. Together, they had worked on two very important performance pieces, both of which she wanted to finish. She believed they were great and important works of art, and through their existence, he would continue to live in this world for as long as she did.

Victoria, her long-time friend and confidante, had become her trusted colleague as she created the music for these two projects. Victoria shared the secrets and sadness that James’s leaving had left behind, with dignity and reverence.

Simon was her husband of twenty-two years. They shared a strangely close bond, even though they had not shared intimacy or any kind of relationship for many years. He felt like an old shoe, comfortable, worn smooth where it otherwise might have chafed, but without the excitement of anything more stylish, more alive, more life affirming or expanding. Their non-existent physical relationship had instead become the thing that chafed, and the chafing had become unbearable.

Angelo was her delicious Greek lover, who had appeared in her life at exactly the right time. Throughout her marriage, Isabelle had never even looked at another man. But the lack of physical intimacy eventually became too much for a sensual woman like Isabelle. When she had to have her car repaired and Angelo, with his dangerous good looks and magnetic personality, turned out to be the mechanic who “healed” her car, she wondered if he could heal her, too. With the encouragement of several of her friends, she boldly approached him, surprised when he confirmed that he would be delighted to be her special friend. But now, a year later, their relationship had turned into the red-hot passionate love affair she had only ever read about.

Angelo had encouraged her to write the book, primarily so they could raise money to buy their own place. It was their little joke, of course. But writing the book had brought so many unexpected insights, not only into the people who shared her life, but it also gave her a rare opportunity to glimpse inside her own soul.

James was right when he told her once “…we don’t meet people by accident. They are really meant to cross our path for a reason.”