Almondbury author Julie Houston on her latest book A Village Vicar

The Village Vicar, to be released on January 19, is the latest - and the first in a trilogy - set in her fictional Westenbury.

“I suppose Westenbury is actually based on Almondbury,” says Julie, of the West Yorkshire village where she lives.

"The problem is, the more I write about it, it has to get bigger and bigger with more and more characters, so I wouldn’t say that it’s actually Almondbury now, really.”

The new book is about three triplets - a vicar, a dentist and a youth worker.

The vicar, Rosa Quinn, is a London businesswoman who finds out she has cancer and that her boyfriend has been unfaithful before deciding to move back up north to Westenbury.

“It’s a lot to do with sibling love, rivalry, friendship, but loyalty,” says Julie. “I would say most of my books are about either female friendship or female sisters.”

Speaking about her interest in writing about a vicar, Julie says she is “not religious at all although I did the usual Sunday school as a kid until I was eleven.

"(I’m) just interested, I suppose, how women have moved into a male-dominated area and achieved huge success.”

In order to build up her character’s back story, Julie spoke to a friend’s daughter, Olivia Woodford, a 33-year-old woman originally from Huddersfield who lives in London and has survived cancer.

Olivia, who went through her illness a few years ago, says she’s “flattered that my story sparked an idea for Julie.

"In many ways my little hiccup year has been a blessing, it taught me some great life lessons and I believe I am a better person for it.”

Julie wanted to set her book in familiar surroundings.

She says: “I’m Huddersfield born and bred. I was born over in the Colne Valley, so across the town centre. Always lived here. And I did find that a lot of novels, when I started writing, really were very London-centric. I mean, obviously, there's Milly Johnson, if you come across her, she lives in Barnsley, she writes very much northern stuff, and there's more and more of this. But it's very good to write people with a good northern accent and good northern humour.”

She adds: “A lot of authors I know who live around here are writing northern stuff. I think there’s more of an appreciation of it and just an acceptance that everything isn’t just south-centred or London-centred.”

Chocolat author Joanne Harris happens to nearby and Julie teaches at Wakefield Girls’, which years ago was attended by Bridget Jones’s Diary writer Helen Fielding.

With a degree in Education and English Literature, Julie initially forged a career as a junior school teacher.

Julie, who has worked as a magistrate for more than 20 years, used to teach in the Huddersfield state school system, but for the last 15 years has taught at the QEGS Foundation in Wakefield doing supply work and part time contracts, mainly at Wakefield Girls' juniors.

Originally, Julie and her agent Anne Williams - who comes from Shipley - from the Kate Horden Literary Agency based in London and Bristol, decided she should publish on Amazon.

It proved successful as the profile she achieved led to a deal with fiction publisher Aria, an imprint Head of Zeus.

Her first three novels – Goodness, Grace and Me; The One Saving Grace; and Looking for Lucy – were all number one bestsellers in the Amazon Humour section, both in the UK and Australia, while Looking for Lucy achieved the overall number one bestseller in the Australian charts.

Her seventh novel, A Village Affair, was the seventh most downloaded ebook of the year on all ebook platforms after its release in November 2018, selling more than 300,000 copies in ebook and paperback combined.

In 2021, Sing Me A Secret won the Romantic Novelist Association’s (RNA) Popular Romantic Fiction Award.

She hates the phrase “chick lit” and says of her books that “you would call them romantic comedies, although I prefer to call them women’s contemporary”, however she adds that men read them as well.

She is married to husband Nigel and has two grown-up children, Ben, 28, and Georgia, 25. She says: “I always say one of the best things I've ever done is having my children. Mind you, (I’ve had) my career in teaching for years and years and which I've loved as well. But actually, writing your very first book and thinking, ‘God, I've actually done it’, is absolutely fantastic.”

Now she “can’t stop”. The next instalment of the vicar books, for instance, has already been written and the third is under way.

What’s her advice to those who want to break into publishing?

“Get it down on paper, and don't give up,” she says. If you know in your heart that you're writing the sort of stuff that you'd like to read, I think that's very important. So just believe in yourself, and you'll get there. We all have rejections to begin with.”

She is also a part of the RNA and spends time with other members.

“They’re very special friends and we go off on writing retreats.

"There is wine and there is a lot of swearing, probably, there’s a lot of laughter, but there’s a lot of writing. We get up and we get on and we write.”