Lessons with Dad novel is inspired by Oswestry author's 14 years of weekly letters to her father
After Vicky Turrell's mother died, she decided to write to her father every week.
Wherever she was, working around the country, on holiday across the world, even once from hospital, she would send him a letter telling him what was happening in her life.
When he died, 14 years later, Vicky, from Oswestry, found letters she had written in his bedside chest of drawers- all 700 of them, dating from the early 1980s.
Those letter have inspired the former headteacher and author to write a fictional novel, Lessons with Dad.
New retired, Vicky said writing each week was a way she could make it up to her father that she lived hundreds of miles away.
"I would send it to him second class on Monday morning so it always got it on a Wednesday. The routine was important to him."
It tells in letter between a father and daughter tell of how a man copes with the loss of his wife and how a woman manages her new job in a village school.
Vicky stressed that her novel was completely fictional with characters including mischievous children, wary villages, a flirtatious parent and a seemingly sanctimonious vicar.
Lessons with Dad is for sale at Booka bookshop in Oswestry, Willow gallery in Oswestry and online at www.leafbyleafpress.com.
