Anatomy of a Scandal: Sunday Times bestseller!

My clever, loving 12 year-old daughter is nothing if not ambitious for her mother. For Christmas this year she bought me a present I refused to wear. A tiny badge, from Southwold Books, with a single word on it: Bestseller. 

I felt bad refusing to play along with the joke but even more uncomfortable at the thought of pinning it to my sparkly top, over a fortnight before publication. 

"But you will wear it if it happens, won't you?" 

"I don't think it will," I said - not because I lacked faith in my publishers but because, like an actor refusing to name The Scottish Play, I couldn't countenance thinking - let alone talking - about something that seemed so unimaginable. 

"But if it does..."

I needed to manage her colossal expectations.

"I really don't think it will but, if it does, I promise."

Reader, I'm wearing that tiny badge now because just three days after being launched Anatomy of a Scandal thrust its way into the list of Sunday Times bestsellers. Backlit tube posters are on show at Westminster tube station and my novel - about power, privilege, and consent - has been catapulted into the very apt number 10 slot - a number that inevitably makes me think of an address at the heart of government, Number 10 Downing Street.

I'm hugely grateful to the fellow authors who read it as a proof and provided me with wonderful quotes; to my editor and the team at S&S who have marketed, sold and publicised it so passionately; and to the book blogging community and journalists who reviewed it in force and championed it on social media.

This would never had happened without you.