I found these vintage baking accessories in a Parisien salon du the, and while I would usually be lured by the patisserie, these were the items that drew me in.

My first novel, The Art of Baking Blind, features a fictitious 1966 recipe book, and I could see its author carefully weighing ingredients decanted from such jars before concocting her millefeuille.  Kathleen Eaden attended the Le Cordon Bleu before my novel began - and, as I feasted on these covetable kitchen accessories, I imagined her life outside my pages: a late teenage rebellion; an affair with a pastry chef;  late nights and early mornings fuelled by coffee stored in tins like these:

Perhaps it's no surprise that, as a writer, I covet vintage things. Despite knowing that most "preloved" finds are tat, I'm drawn to old china, books, furniture: anything with the potential to trigger a story.

I live in an eighteenth-century cottage that we renovated. And as we opened up chimneys and pulled at floorboards, it kept revealing secrets; glimpses of others' lives. Who hid that toy soldier up the chimney? Or buried the 1930s advert for slimming aids? Or the glass bottle labelled arsenic in the garden? Who owned these pieces from the past that kept whispering their tales?

Then there are the vintage finds I’ve picked up at jumble sales or local auctions: a delicate coffee cup and saucer, etched in gold leaf; mismatched crockery; a 1950s pitcher with “Jug” somewhat unnecessarily stamped on it. A child’s eighteenth-century rocking chair, bought for £70, whittled in oak by a father, and revealing a name graffitied by a small girl: Ivy.  A French-polished writing box, belonging to a grandfather who took poetry books to war and lost them when captured on Kos; my grandmother’s locket, which I can never open without catching the scent of her.

I never thought I would write historical fiction but it now seems inevitable that the past would worm its way in. "The past kept pricking at me," explains LP Hartley's narrator, in The Go-Between, and it's a quotation that could preface many of the novels that fascinate me.

We are the sum of our past, as well as our present and future, which surely explains the burgeoning interest in genealogy and the existence of programmes such as the BBC's You Do You Think You Are? as well as our nostalgic hankering for vintage things. "The past is not a package one can lay away," as Emily Dickinson said. And we see that throughout our culture - from watching Downton to being fascinated by World War II to visiting National Trust houses. And yes, to purchasing accessories inspired by the 1950s or 60s: those Tala measuring jugs; or Keep Calm and Carry On cards, which work precisely because we know they are a play on Kitchener's iconic poster. Because we share that history.

When writing about a farm in north Cornwall, run by the same family for six generations, it seemed obvious, then, that I would draw on my own family's past and in particular the stories my mother told me of spending her childhood summers on a Cornish farm.

But though her recollections fed into it, I needed a prop: some tangible evidence that would sit on my desk and inspire me as I pushed through the third draft, and the fourth, fifth and sixth. Something that would whisper its past to me, when I was feeling sluggish; that along with my photographs of the area, would prompt me to think: "what if?" and, "and then what?"  

This sepia photograph does just that:

It shows my great grandfather, Matthew Henry Jelbert, hoeing mangolds on Trewiddle, his farm, just outside St Austell. He looks slightly shy yet rather proud as he leads his shire horse and the plough. Dressed for the camera, he sports a tie, white shirt and collar, gold fob watch and luxuriant moustache. His farmhand waits discreetly, for this is Matthew’s moment, even though the horse, the most expensive animal on the farm, dominates the picture.

Matthew Jelbert was born in 1880 in Newlyn East, towards the tip of Cornwall, seven miles from Truro and Newquay. He died in 1970, two years before I was born, yet both he and his farm - or rather the tales of them - played a vivid part in my childhood.

The summers spent there in the Fifties were the happiest of my mother's early years. Her father, Maurice, was a Methodist minister. But when he helped with the harvest he was just a farmer’s boy and she was freed of the constraints imposed on a minister’s daughter.

She would run wild with her cousin Graham, eighteen months younger than her but, growing up on a farm, more worldly-wise. They would climb trees; blow birds’ nests; hide in the stooks of corn; play doctors and nurses under the rhododendron bushes. A chalky stream ran at the bottom of the field, from the china clay pits, and she believed that it was milk, and Trewiddle, heaven. For a child expected to go to church three times on a Sunday, it was quite literally the land of milk and honey.

Trewiddle held such a strong sway over me as a child that I named my doll’s house and its connected farm after it. And when I came to write my novel, about a granite farmhouse on a remote stretch of the north Cornish coast, my mother and her cousin’s memories, and the photos of the farm, weaved their way in.

Great grandpa Matthew watches me, now, as I type.

My past is pricking at me. I am taking liberties with it. But I hope I do it justice.

The Art of Baking Blind is published in Germany today as Die Zutaten des Glücks - or the rather lovely The Ingredients of Happiness. And as well as this being an opportunity to bake celebratory cheesecakes, black forest gateaux and my first ever bundt, it's made me contemplate fonts.

For while my German publisher Bastei Lübbe has used the same cover as Hodder, it departed from the original in using a different font for the sections in the past and a special letter-writing font for the one letter in the book.  I love the changes but it's made me think about how we view the typography of novels.

When I submitted The Art of Baking Blind to publishers, I used italics for the quotations from The Art of Baking, the vintage cookery book whose bon mots top each chapter. But I also used italics for the flashbacks that intersperse the present day plot, which concern the cookbook's author Kathleen Eaden and run from 1964-66.

I wanted to clearly convey that these sections belonged to a different time and also differed in style, being exclusively from Kathleen Eaden's point of view. They were the most intensely emotional parts of the book and although they complemented the present day plot could be read as an individual story. 

I hadn't considered, however, that while italics are routinely used to convey direct inner thoughts - most explicitly in a novel like Gone Girl - or for lists or letters, they signal to some readers that they can be skipped. The same could be said for any fonts used for meta-fiction. My 10-year-old, rereading the Harry Potter books, leaves out The Daily Prophet sections, the parts written in a heavy newspaper typeface. "They slow up the story," she explains. "My friends do it, too. We go back and re-read those sections if they're not explained later and we need to fill in the gaps."

None of this had occurred to me before Nina Stibbe, the bestselling author of Love, Nina and Man at the Helm, was kind enough to read a proof of my novel and pointed out the risks of sustained italicised sections. "I loved it but there's just one thing I don't like," she said. "The italics. You don't want people to skim them. Could you think about getting them changed?" 

She was so persuasive that we reverted to the usual font with the sections being headed Kathleen. Bastei Lübbe didn't want to use our formula but came up with an excellent alternative: not using italics but a font which differs distinctly from the Times New Roman or Cambria we are used to seeing as the usual types. It's a technique also used recently in Marian Keyes' bestselling The Woman Who Stole My Life, in which the present day sections are in a more modern font to the back story set four years previously. 

Bastei Lübbe also used a letter-writing font for the crucial letter on which Kathleen's story turns, which conjures up the era in which it was written, 1972: 

As Iris Gehrmann, editor of fiction, explains: "We chose a different font for the Kathleen passages to distinguish her perspective from those of the other characters in the book. And the special handwriting font used for Kathleen’s letter at the end of the book is supposed to emphasize the very personal character of the document and its nostalgic flair." 

All of which makes me wonder if I've become rather conservative not just in the way in which I react to fonts when reading but when writing. I tend to write in Times New Roman or Cambria, liking the implied authority and the way in which it is similar to the Sabon MT used by Hodder for my novel. In other words, the fact that it looks like a "proper" book. 

Some authors switch to different fonts to edit: the change flagging up errors or prompting them to read in a fresh way. "I change font when I'm line editing. I think it helps me to spot errors more easily if I'm staring at a different typeface," Joanna Cannon, author of The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, to be published in the New Year, explains. That works for me but an experiment in writing in Helvetica this week took me way out of my comfort zone. Nothing that I'd written read or sounded right.

Perhaps I could learn from my seven-year-old who enjoys books which eschew the formality of a traditional font or subvert it - such as Andy Stanton's Mr Gum books, in which smudged fingerprints or decreasing and increasing font sizes pepper the page - or which reject the authority of a typed text and appear to be handwritten.  "Why do you enjoy the Wimpy Kid books so much?" I ask my boy, as he pores over the latest instalment after reading Tom Gates. "Because there's more space around the words," he explains as if it is perfectly straightforward. "They're easier to read."

It seems I may have been too precious in my attitude to fonts. I tweet Marian Keyes to ask her about her use of them in The Woman Who Stole My Life and she quickly gets back to me. (She's fiendishly good at and prolific on twitter.) 

 "Why don't you play around with those available to you and see what ones appeal?" she asks - opening up all sorts of future possibilities. "Have fun with it."

The author David Nicholls recently wrote  in The Guardian about the importance of visiting the places described in his novels. In a world in which we can click on google earth to research a spot, he argued for the need to visit the locations in which his fiction is set. I read the article en route to Bodmin moor - a 700-mile round trip from my Cambridgeshire home - and one of the settings of my next novel. A small part of me wondered if this was the ultimate in procrastination. Having come back newly inspired, I only wish I'd returned before.

My second book is set on a farm in north Cornwall, an area I know well having holidayed there each year since I was a child. But there's a section based on the moor and though I'd taken two trips down there in the past 12 months to interview octogenarian farmers and to visit its airfields, and raced over it for three decades, I hadn't explored it all. 

One of my characters embarks on a quest to find a half-remembered farmhouse and I couldn't get these scenes quite right, sitting at my desk at home. I hadn't captured the peculiar claustrophobia of high-banked hedgerows or of tiny villages hidden in the folds between tors. Nor was I sure about the smell: damp grass; musky bracken; honeyed gorse?  My character, an intrepid 83-year-old, gets lost, and it was clear I needed to do the same as her.

And so I did. For it's hard not to become disorientated when you're relying on signposts that turn in contradictory directions and interpreting a Cornish mile as, well, a mile. And then the mist came down. A mizzle that made it impossible to see the tors I was searching for; that seeped through my trainers and into my bones; that reminded me of quite how bleak and inhospitable any moor can become.

Daphne du Maurier came up with the idea of Jamaica Inn when she got lost in the mist while riding - just a few miles from where I was. And as I climbed out of tiny Blisland towards St Breward - the area in which Poldark's farmhouse in the recent BBC TV series was filmed - I became similarly disorientated by a visibility that, at best, was poor. Incapable of seeing any farmhouse, or even the track in front of me, I had to stop still. It was just me, the relentless rain, and some Highland Cattle grazing amongst the gorse.

I had wanted atmosphere; a sense of place that was almost tangible;  images which would fill my notepad and fuel me as I completed this tricky draft. And here it was. Shrouded in the mist, I scrawled furiously and, when it lifted, found that other famous du Maurier moorland setting, Altarnum.

The picturesque village clustered around an imposing granite church where her vicar caricatured his flock as sheep, who hung on his every word. The air was scented with wild garlic; the hedgerows stuffed with greater stitchworth; bluebells; buttercups and red campion. Mallards waddled towards allotments; rhododendrons bloomed. There was even a tiny village hall, fringing a brook that, yes, really did babble.

It was time to head out. Back to the wildness of the open moor. To an area at the heart of Cornwall and at the emotional tipping point of my novel. 

It's an expanse that brings back painful memories for my 83-year-old. Thanks to my return trip, I'm a little more confident about describing her experience.

My novel about why we bake is published by St Martin's Press today - and it's a surreal but wonderful feeling: knowing that my book may be being picked up in bookshops so far away. 

St Martin's have also asked me to come up with some reading group questions and I found them a joy to write. Preoccupied with the redraft of my second novel, it was a delight to turn back to my first one and to lavish a little attention on it. I hope they prove useful. (And if any US readers have recipes for typically American bakes - pecan pie, pumpkin pie, whoopie pies perhaps - I'd love to hear about them.)

Reading group questions: (Note: spoilers.)

1. Blind baking is a technique for ensuring a perfect pastry case yet, as Jenny muses, "so much can go wrong." The impossibility of perfection is a major theme in this novel. Who, in your opinion, is the character that personifies this trait most clearly? And what lies behind the "be perfect" compulsion exhibited by many women.

2. The germ of this novel came when I started baking with my small children. At the same time, I noted the competitiveness of mothers running school cake sales. Is our interest in baking an expression of a hankering for a simpler, gentler - and perhaps fictitious - time? Or is it about a need for validation particularly among highly-educated, stay-at-home mothers?

3. At the heart of the book is the idea of family. For most of the women, baking or cooking represents the idea of "home" or an idealised home. Why do we invest food with such significance? And what do you think of the characters in the novel who fail to perceive food in this way?

4. Food can also be about control, as exemplified by Karen. What do you think of the portrayal of disordered eating in the novel? Is the portrayal sympathetic - do we understand Karen's behaviour?

5. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." The Yeats' epigraph is recalled by Jenny as her sponge curdles and she thinks of her disintegrating marriage. Where else is baking used figuratively to represent personality traits or to mirror a character's experience?

6. Many of the women in the novel are struggling with a change in their lives and it's this dissatisfaction that leads them to apply for the competition. Jenny has lost her old role of wife and full-time mother; Karen is struggling with the idea that her body is ageing Vicki is struggling to adapt to being a stay-at-home mum who may only have one child. Only Claire - whose mother applies on her behalf - is not at such a crossroads. Does this make her a less dynamic; or less sympathetic, character? If not, why? 

7. Are there any characters you found unlikeable? If so, why?

8. Did you expect Kathleen's story to end as it did? Did you find that satisfying?

9. In my own family, we have passed down favourite recipes. What are yours and is there an equivalent of an Art of Baking in your life: the culinary Bible that has shaped the way you bake?