The fact that her main character was homosexual delayedthe publication of Marion Husband's first novel, she tells Steve Pratt.

AFTER many rejections, Marion Husband resigned herself to her first book, The Boy I Love, being her "bottom drawer novel" - the one that nobody wanted to publish. The Teesside-set story of soldiers coming home from the First World War and adjusting to family life again was rejected time and again by publishers. The problem was that the main character was homosexual, a soldier returning from war to be reunited with his male lover.

"There are three love stories - two heterosexual and one intense gay love story, which complicated it from a publishers' point of view," she explains. "They said they thought it might be too controversial and didn't know where it might fall in the market. The main reason the manuscript came back was the gay thing.

"It did surprise me because there were TV programmes like This Life and people like Graham Norton are successful. I think the publishers might have taken it if I was an established best selling author."

The manuscript lay around for a year until mother-of-two Husband, from Stockton, read about a new publisher, Accent, that was looking for fresh writers. She submitted The Boy I Love and had it accepted.

Now she has been given the £4,000 Andrea Badenoch Award by Northern Writers to support her developing a sequel, Paper Moon.

She only just qualified for the award, which is open to women writers of fiction over 42 - Husband is 43. The prize is awarded in honour of Badenoch, who lived in Newcastle and produced four novels in the last few years of her life before her death in 2004.

"It's really nice recognition for my writing - and nice publicity because my first novel comes out on July 4," says Husband, who is a tutor with the Open College of the Arts. "I've only been a full-time writer for a few months. I've been writing a long time but lately my husband's business has got better and the time had come, I thought, to concentrate on my writing."

"I always wanted to write as a child but stopped when I had children. They're teenagers now, so I went to an evening class on writing for pleasure and profit."

Encouraged by her teacher, Husband had a collection of stories, Three Little Deaths, published and collection of poetry about her father, called Service. She did an MA at Northumbria University, where she won the Blackwell Prize for best performance by a student on the course.

The Boy I Love is set over nine months spanning 1919 and 1920 as war veterans return "with their hang-ups, shell shock and stuff and are coming to terms with civilian lives and their partners".

Just as her poetry collection was inspired by her father, who fought in World War Two, so her family's past influenced The Boy I Love. "My grandfather was killed in World War One, as well as my uncle," she says. "My dad used to tell stories about his family and what happened, like getting a telegram to say someone had been killed. The book is about going through all this and having to settle down again."

The background is real but the book is fiction. The small town to which the soldiers return is the imaginary Thorp, a mix of Stockton and Thornaby, where Husband grew up. Bigger towns, such as Darlington and Newcastle, retain their real names.

"I didn't want to make it too geographically pinpointed," she says. "People, when they read it, can tell it's Stockton if they know the place. It comes from writing about what I know - and I know Stockton and Thornaby."

Very few novels have been set on Teesside, she feels, although she's aware of Pat Barker's award-winning writing. "She also covers that aspect of gay men in the trenches, but she's based very much in the war and mine is after the war. I just thought it was an interesting aspect to write about," she says. "I finished The Boy I Love before I heard of Pat Barker."

A former bank clerk, she worked in husband John's management consultancy business before turning to writing full-time. He has yet to read her first novel. "He says he'll read it when it's out properly," says Husband, who has a daughter, Kay, 18, and a son, Gregory, 17.

Her second novel, Paper Moon, is set during World War Two and is about the sons of the men featured in the first novel.

"It can be read independently from The Boy I Love," she says. "Some people warned me not to write it in case I didn't sell the first one. But they say you have to get characters out of your system and I hadn't quite got them out of mine," she says.

Husband has now started work on a third book, set in modern times. "It's too raw to talk about but it's set between 1968 and now, a period which I remember quite vividly."

* Marion Husband will be signing copies of The Boy I Love in Waterstone's, Middlesbrough on July 4.

Published: 24/05/2005