After her initial teaching career, she retrained as a Jungian analytical psychotherapist, subsequently working in the NHS.

I have an acute sense of life’s prodigality —its hidden resources and splendour if we only care to look. This is a novel that has really withstood the test of time and it is a book I often suggest to people who are off to Venice. I don’t plan, as I say, but I find ideas, and characters, arise like helpful genies when I need them. Intrigued by the paintings, Julia begins unraveling the story they tell of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael, an ancient tale depicting a quest of faith and redemption.

There is also plenty of religious mysticism, beautiful descriptions of Venice which make you want to go there at once, and a parallel story within the story. From couch to ballroom: Ex-therapist Salley Vickers has always based her characters on parts of her inner self, she tells Lisa O'Kelly. When Dog Records come sniffing after a film and demo that her lover, Jack, supposedly made before his death, she plays it "like the cobra coiled round the treasure chest". For the first time in her life she falls in love—with an art dealer named Carlo—and her once ordinary world is further transformed by a beautiful Italian boy, Nicco, and an enigmatic pair of twins engaged in restoring the fourteenth-century Chapel-of-the-Plague. What effects do the events and discoveries of her visit have on her sense of self, as a communist grounded in atheism and as a woman generally wary of life’s “irrational” realms, whether romantic, mystical, or spiritual?

As the time passes, she learns to re-evaluate some of her core beliefs and to trawl her deeper soul in quiet contemplation. Despite the suspicion and antipathy toward Catholic display, millions of Calvinists seem to feel almost envious of the astounding outpouring of genius and talent that even fairly modest Old World Catholic and Orthodox churches contain. Miss Garnet’s Angel was not a perfect book, but it was very readable and had a strong principle character and great setting, and enough themes and plot meanderings to continue to be worth thinking about once the reader has put it down. What would it be like not having to understand something intellectually but actually entering into it, becoming part of the story instead of the critic? I have to share a quote from the Tobit story: “Azarius, I said, You told me once I may find out who or what you worshiped .

Through Miss Garnet’s eyes, we encounter a city swarming with the ghosts of history and enduring even in the face of its own perpetual erosion into the sea. Most affecting to Julia, though, is her discovery in a local church of panels depicting the ancient tale of Tobias and the Angel. This is a tough book to describe, it reads like literature, with a strong reliance on the setting - mostly Venice - and characterisation of the protagonist.

Her retirement, the loss of a friend, and an unexpected legacy have a polarising effect on her, and quite out of character, she decides to spend six months in Venice, renting a small apartment in this beautiful city. Once more the door was open, once more a bent figure shuffled towards me asking for money, but this time I knew the lovely story of the paintings which greeted me like long lost friends. He was referring to the quiet power of the understated, and the British have a tradition of novels about the still small voices, and the profound yet ordinary emotions, that sometimes get short shrift amid the fireworks of our soap-opera culture.All my characters are aspect on my own selves —and the more successful the character I would say the more unconscious the self. It still exists —and the Parsees are its main inheritors —but what attracts me to it most is its great stress on tolerance —especially religious tolerance, which all of us who have lived through recent troubles must agree has become an urgent necessity in our time.

Since you’ve tempted me I suppose I might hope to have deepened the reader’s sense of life’s rich possibility, and sense of the value inherent in apparently unimportant people and things. Out of her suburban English comfort zone, she allows people, paintings and the place itself to touch her soul for the first time. Julia Garnet is, among other things, a woman struggling to emerge from the long shadow cast by her father’s censure and abuse. A ravishing novel possessed of an insistent emotional honesty and an infectious curiosity about life’s oldest mysteries, Miss Garnet’s Angel is that rarest of contemporary novels: kindhearted and complex, subtle and genuinely suspenseful.Sally Vickers has once again woven a story that questions what we think we know about faith and life gently encouraging the reader, like Miss Garnet to draw back the veil of what we are seeing and to look beyond the veil. Julia Garnet’s life continues to expand as she explores what Venice has to offer, her social life blossoms, and she experiences a spiritual awakening of sorts, as she realises how wonderfully uplifting the religious worship she has shunned for most of her life can be. So I scrapped it and tried for something old and plain —different from the more complex syntax of the Venetian sections. I discovered the story has strong Zoroastrian antecedents —and I became very enamoured of the Zoroastrians. Salley Vickers's debut novel, Miss Garnet's Angel , is one of those heartening, unpredictable word-of-mouth successes that assure us we are not entirely slaves to hype.