Her novel The Island (2005), which the Sunday Express hailed as "the new Captain Corelli's Mandolin", was a number one bestseller in Britain, its success in part the result of having been selected by the Richard & Judy Book Club for their 2006 Summer Reads.
In 2009, she donated the short story Aflame in Athens to Oxfam's "Ox-Tales" project, four collections of British stories written by 38 authors.