AUTHOR Margaret Tuckwell is hoping the number 13 will bring her good luck and her highest book sales so far.

Her 13th novel, Mother Nature, was publishedon Friday, and already book borrowers are waiting to read it.

Margaret, from Highworth, whose pen name is Margaret Bacon, began her career with a travel book called Journey to Guyana which, 30 years after it first appeared, is still in print in paperback.

She also has a children's book, A Packetful of Trouble, to her credit. Nearly 100,000 people a year snap up her fiction from Britain's public library shelves.

Mother Nature is the story of Flora and her strained relationship with her mother, a well-known journalist and radio and TV personality who had regarded her only child as an encumbrance.

After the misery of an emotionally deprived childhood, Flora is determined to create a secure and happy home for her own husband and two children.

It all seems to work out for the best but does it?

"My books have all been about relationships, because it's people's lives, rather than events, which interest me,'' said Margaret, a former history teacher with an Oxford degree.

She says she dislikes the violence and near pornography which are part of much of today's popular fiction. Although her last book, The Ewe Lamb, featured two horrendous rapes in the same family, sex is confined to or only just beyond the bedroom door in novels by the 69-year-old.

"I actually get letters from people asking me why there are now so few books which don't include graphic sex and viciousness,'' she said, "Publishers say it sells, but many apparently forget that a significant number of people actually dislike it.''

Margaret and her husband Richard Tuckwell moved to Highworth from Cornwall 20 years ago. He died soon afterwards. They had been married for 25 years.

She is now working on a family trilogy. The first book, set around the 1914-18 war, is already completed.

Mother Nature, published by Severn House at £17.99, is available from Waterstone's in Regent Street.