IF you go to one of Amanda Brooke’s book launches or talks do not be afraid to ask her about her son.

The author lost Nathan to leukaemia when he was just three and she describes writing as the ‘legacy that he’s left me’ .

That is why she is not afraid to make that most terrible moment in her life part of her talks.

Amanda, a volunteer for the Alder Centre, a support service for bereaved parents, said: “One thing with bereaved parents is you don’t get to talk about the children that have died because it makes people uncomfortable.

“I’m writing because of Nathan. That’s the legacy that he’s left me. I wouldn’t have been doing this if he hadn’t have been in my life and so I make that part of the author talks.

“I talk about him and people are probably more comfortable hearing about it in that context. It’s nice having that opportunity to talk about him and I get a lot of support.”

It was not always like that though.

When Nathan became ill, Amanda struggled physically to get the words our – and so she kept a journal instead which helped her process what she was going through.

The 51-year-old added: “I couldn’t talk about it so writing, for me, was therapy. I kept a journal throughout his illness. I just wanted to capture every memory.”

When Amanda discovered she had a flair for writing she experimented with poetry – and in the aftermath of Nathan’s death it helped her cope.

She then threw herself into night classes in creative writing for 12 weeks as an escape while working in local government.

Amanda said: “I started reading poetry that I could connect with and then I started to write my own which was a way for me to explain how I felt. When you lose a child it is just the blackest, bleakest moment in your life and it was just something to cling onto really.

“It was a means to get through that. It wasn’t particularly to have a product at the end of it.”

But then one day Amanda saw an advert on a bus for The Time Traveller’s Wife in Liverpool city centre. It made her think about the concept of time travel in the context of what she had lost and that led to her first novel Yesterday’s Sun.

It is about a woman who is faced with a desperate choice after seeing two possible futures – one which sees her die in childbirth and another which erases the life of her unborn daughter.

Amanda added: “It was about four years after Nathan died but you sort of think if I could go back in time what would I do?

“That was the lightbulb moment of not only having the desire to write but the idea.”

Amanda will be visiting Culcheth library on Tuesday and her eight novel, The Bad Mother, is out next Thursday.

But despite now being an established author she says she still has to pinch herself when she sees her books on the shelves.

She said: “It does feel quite strange. I gave up work to write full time in November 2016 and I’m a published author but when I go to events with other writers I still feel like a fraud.

“It’s hard to believe that I’ve got eight books published now. It still feels all new to me.”

Amanda also regularly involves her daughter Jess, 22, in the creative process and The Bad Mother was no exception.

She added: “I’m always talking through my ideas with her. With The Bad Mother there’s a climactic scene towards the end and I remember describing it to Jess when she burst into tears so I knew to keep that one in.

“I do like to draw on emotion and I can get an idea from Jess if I’m on the right track.”

  • Amanda Brooke will be at Culcheth library on Tuesday at 6.30pm. Tickets are £2.50 including refreshments and are available at any of Warrington's libraries