Margaret BaconAUTHOR and former history teacher Margaret Tuckwell is to celebrate the publication of her 16th published novel with a launch party at Waterstone's Swindon bookshop tomorrow.

The book, For Better, For Worse, is the last part of a trilogy set around a Cotswold country house and the lives, loves and tragedies of people who lived and worked there during and immediately after the period dominated by two world wars.

Mrs Tuckwell, who has two daughters and two grandchildren, lives in Shrivenham Road, Highworth.

Like all her books, For Better, For Worse appears under her maiden name, Margaret Bacon.

She has been compared favourably with best-selling authors Maeve Binchy, Rosamunde Pilcher and Elizabeth Jane Howard, but her books sell better in the USA than in this country.

However, every year they are read by tens of thousands of people who borrow them from public libraries and parts one and two of her trilogy were bought by one of Britain's biggest and most successful book clubs.

Margaret's writing career began with a travel book which she called Journey To Guyana.

She spent two years in the South American country when her husband Richard Tuckwell, a civil engineer, was working there.

Back in Britain she felt she needed to put her memories of the place down on paper before they were forgotten.

Two years later her manuscript was accepted by a publisher and since then there has been no stopping her.

Her list of successes also includes a children's book, A Packetful Of Trouble, written when her daughters were small.

"They were my most demanding critics," she said.

The older of the two, Caroline, is now married to a doctor and the other, Penelope, is a trilingual secretary working in Switzerland.

Margaret, an Oxford graduate with a history degree, spends months researching the periods covered by her novels.

"It has to be right," she said. "People will soon spot it if you get any of the details and the feeling of the period wrong."

She still does her first draft in exercise books, using a soft pencil.

And she says she revises them several times before committing her manuscripts to a word processor.

She says her characters dictate the story and she has even been known to say good morning to them as she walks into her study.

"Actually for most of the time I'd rather not write," she said.

"But I have to listen to them. They take over."

For Better, For Worse is published in hardback by Severn House at £18.99 and is in the shops now.

Shirley Mathias