The best books with quirky heroines

I love a good page-turning thriller, but to keep my interest, there has to be more than thrills and spills – I want characters I care about too.

The heroine here, unusually, is a teenage girl, who’s funny, smart, and stroppy, but at the same time vulnerable and scared. She teams up with a nosy elderly lady who proves to have hidden depths and as they find themselves in a terrifying situation and tackle some seriously bad villains, I was rooting for them all the way.  

This one’s a story of obsessive love, with a heroine who is undoubtedly flawed, but who you can’t help cheering on, even when she’s doing very bad things.

You wouldn’t want her to be your brother’s girlfriend, but she’d be hilarious company on a night out. The story is darkly funny, but ultimately uplifting, which I think is a great combination in a book.

I love Diana Norman’s historical novels and she inspires the way I write mine.

Her books are packed with historical atmosphere but they're never stodgy, the characters are full of life and there's always a dash of humour. This one, set in 17th-century London, is my favourite.

The heroine, Penitence Hurd, is a young Puritan girl who comes to London just as the Great Plague is about to strike, and finds herself - to her horror - living alongside the working girls in a brothel. She’s such an engaging character, stiff and prim at the beginning but as she bonds with the other women when they're shut in during the plague, she begins to change.

This quirky debut novel features one of my favourite ever heroines.

Fourteen-year-old Jackie is a funny, feisty would-be poet, who finds herself a fish out of water when she's placed with a foster family very different from her own, with a teenage daughter who hates her. It's set in 1970s England, when I was the same age as Jackie is, so it was a lovely nostalgic read.

It's based on the author's own experience of being fostered, and knowing that made the story even more poignant - it made me laugh and cry.

In late 1950s London, Jean Swinney is a journalist on a local paper, resigned to being given the soft 'women's interest' stories at work, and going home each evening to her crochety, demanding mother.

I worked as a journalist in the 1980s, and even then, the women on the team were often patronised and the men kept the good stories for themselves, so I could absolutely empathise with Jean.

She's far from your classic heroine yet Clare Chambers writes her so beautifully: thoroughly fed up with her lot, yet managing to keep a wry sense of humour and find small moments of pleasure in life.

As a peculiar work assignment led her to a chance at happiness, I was on the edge of my seat, hoping for a happy ending.