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The Rainbow Sign
When I was twelve I went to live in the Lebanon
for three years. I attended a local French-speaking convent
— popular with respectable Christian Lebanese families
— where I was the only English child.
I used this background for The Rainbow Sign,
but set the story in a different decade. I found that once
I started to write about Beirut the memories came flooding
back, and I have reproduced one scene as accurately as I can:
the one where the girls from the convent are taken by the
nuns to visit a poor family.
The Rainbow Sign was called in
by the Booker judges, one of the first crime novels to be
considered for this prize.
Gwen Moffat in Shots 33 wrote: ‘The
Rainbow Sign is a thriller that can’t be faulted. No
solecisms but colourful imagery … breath-taking descriptions
of a desert country eclipsed only by Stallwood’s insight
into people’s minds.’
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