The bestselling romantic novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin may have put Louis de Bernières on the literary map – but it's been difficult to move on.

"I'm just waiting for the time when people don't mention Captain Corelli's Mandolin when they are interviewing me," he
smiles. He's not quite there yet.

The 53-year-old writer, who took 10 years to write another novel after Corelli, recalls: "After Captain Corelli I got a fit of writer's stroppiness. "I felt I had the world looking over my shoulder and it was irritating."

He may have felt "stroppy" about the pressure to produce another bestseller, but eventually ignored it and decided to go his own way.

His latest novel, A Partisan's Daughter, is an unusual love story about Chris, a middle-aged salesman trapped in a loveless marriage in the 1970s, who invites prostitute Roza into his car. Roza is Yugoslavian and the daughter of one of Tito's partisans. She tells him tales of danger, romance and tragedy from her life.

Another character in the book, "Bob Dylan Upstairs", who lives in Roza's building, is modelled on de Bernières when he was in his 20s, he reveals. "Bob Dylan Upstairs was me in 1979. I was living in exactly that house with pretty much that woman. She was fascinating and quite scary. I wrote all her stories down. I never really found a way of turning it into a novel."

The novel is set in the winter of discontent, when the country was in the grip of strikes, power cuts and misery.

"I remember that time very vividly," he says. "It was the most depressing period I've ever lived through."

He grew up in Surrey, boarded at prep and public schools and signed up with the army as a teenager – but only lasted four months at Sandhurst. He studied philosophy at Manchester University instead, went to Colombia to teach, became a cowboy in Argentina and had a succession of jobs in England.

His experiences in South America gave him the inspiration for his first three novels, before his fourth put him on the bestsellers list.

The author, who lives in Norfolk with his partner, actress and director
Cathy Gill, and their two children, Robin, three, and four-week-old Sophie, did not become an instant millionaire with Corelli. The money arrived slowly. He prefers to stay out of the limelight, even when Captain Corelli was at its peak.

"I'm happy to be well known but I don't want to be a celebrity. Anyway, I'm not young, beautiful and slim."

Away from writing, he collects instruments, including the flute, the guitar and his beloved mandolin. He has three books on the go – two collections of short stories and he's started his next epic.

While he had mixed feelings about the film version of Captain Corelli, he hasn't ruled out other movies.

"I thought Nicolas Cage was miscast, but I was mostly annoyed by naff changes to the story. And there was no mandolin music. If there was another film made, it might be a triumph, it might not. But I'd quite like to do the soundtrack myself."