Stephen Lewis meets a York woman whose first novel is also the first book from a new York-based publishing house.

"I am a girl who loves to be alone," says Kate, the central character in new author Karen Powell's first novel. "Lottie, the silly creature, can't do it. My sister, though she is thirteen and older than me by two whole years and a bit, cannot even spend a quiet half hour in her room... But what I love are the little pockets of aloneness that come my way now that I am getting bigger."

Catching The Light is an intense, inward-looking novel about a woman who finds it difficult to make connections or form relationships. The reader first meets Kate as a confident, eager-to-please child: until a troubled bully tells her a secret that changes her forever.

As an adult living in London, Kate is detached from friends, family and even lovers. After an abortion, she suffers a breakdown and returns to her childhood home.

And it is there, through a friendship with a painfully young single mother and her five-year-old child, that she finally learns to face the shadows still cast over her life by her own childhood.

The writing in Catching The Light is powerful and immediate, drawing the reader instantly into the story so that you come to care about the withdrawn character at its heart.

Meeting author Karen Powell herself, however, is a bit of a surprise.

She doesn't seem withdrawn or reticent at all. On the contrary she's tall, dark, attractive and talks about her book with fluency and passion - as you would expect from a Cambridge English Literature graduate.

So where did the character of Kate come from?

Karen, who lives right in the centre of York near the Minster, admits there probably are elements of herself in Kate. "I suppose I am a fairly private person," she says.

But authors are like magpies, she adds, picking up anything that catches their eye and putting it into their work. So Kate isn't her at all, really: it is just that a few of her own characteristics are picked up on and exaggerated in the character.

What she wanted to achieve by writing about such a character was to explore the inner life of a woman: to examine the things that make life worthwhile. "I think everyone has moments when they think 'what do I believe in, what's it all based on?" she says. "It's not just about women's feelings: men have those feelings as well. But I would say it is a book that is meant for women."

Karen isn't your typical Cambridge graduate. Born and brought up in Kent, she left school at 16 to work in a string of jobs in travel agencies and building societies.

It was only in her twenties that she thought about getting a proper education. She did a couple of A-levels then, at 25, got accepted at Lucy Cavendish College - a Cambridge college for mature women students.

"I loved it," she says. "I was sitting behind a desk in a building society one day, and cycling through Cambridge to lectures the next Monday."

After leaving Cambridge, she quickly became pregnant with her first (and only) child, Isabella, who is now six. Then she began writing. "I just felt my brain was turning to mush!" she says. Her husband, Steve, is a book editor, which helped. Her first attempt at a novel didn't quite work, Karen admits, but Catching The Light was like a dream to write.

It has now become the first book to be published by Harbour, a new York-based publishing house which Steve has set up.

Harbour already has a list of several more books due out later this year, mostly literary fiction. Catching The Light, meanwhile, is attracting attention in London and elsewhere, and Karen is now working on her next book.

Catching The Light by Karen Powell is published by Harbour, at £9.99.

Updated: 16:15 Friday, April 29, 2005