Simonetta Agnello Hornby: 'In my novels, there's always some abuse'

On a hot afternoon in August, Simonetta Agnello Hornby was waiting for a delayed flight from Palermo to London when she had a vision. Not of the Madonna, but of a flickering movie screen. Spelled out in bright lights were the celestial words "La mennulara": the almond picker.

"It was the most wonderful moment of my life," she recalls, brewing espresso in her Westminster flat. "My luggage was heavy that day, full of jams and bay leaves. I had no paper or pen, which has never happened to me. I started thinking about the cat... and will it be raining? And then it happened."

The vision wouldn't leave her. Carving out time from her day job as a successful children's lawyer in London, she wrote her first novel, The Almond Picker. Within months she found a publisher and, rather unconventionally, dedicated the book to British Airways. It was the first in what would be a trilogy of best-selling novels set in Sicily.

Not much in Agnello Hornby's life has been conventional. Born into an aristocratic Sicilian family - "the lower aristocracy, not the higher one" - she was brought up in Palermo by a Hungarian nanny. She might have continued this life of cosmopolitan comfort indefinitely had she not been sent to Cambridge to learn English. Here she she met and fell in love with her future husband and started work on a law degree.

A pipe-smoker with a preference for sensible shoes, Agnello Hornby, now 61, exudes a tough femininity that must serve her well in court. After the birth of her two sons she exchanged a glamorous job in a City law firm to work as a childcare lawyer. Not long after, she set up her own pioneering practice in Brixton, specialising in childcare and domestic violence. She says she ran "a happy firm in a terrible field". Indeed, the book she is most proud of isn't a novel but The Caribbean Children's Law Project (1997).

While lawyers-turned-novelists often choose courtroom drama, Agnello Hornby's fiction has been shaped by years of crafting character statements. "I never, ever present my clients in a totally positive light, because it's not true. I'd rather get them before the other side does. Just like I can direct a judge, I get the reader to decide if they like a character or not."

Just such a question hangs over Mennulara, the eponymous heroine of her distinctive debut. When the novel opens, Mennulara, housekeeper to the wealthy Alfallipe family for over 40 years, is on her deathbed. Her cryptic will raises more questions than it answers. As her story unfolds she is variously revealed as a gold-digger, sexual siren and Mafia moll. In small-town Sicily, nothing is quite as it seems.

"Life is complicated," says Agnello Hornby, taking a disconcerting puff on her Maigret-style pipe. "In all my novels, there's always some abuse, because that's life. I try to show abusers aren't monsters. They certainly aren't confined to any one class. No one should be treated like the shit of the world." In her mouth, the letter "t" sounds nicely al dente.

While The Almond Picker is narrated as a series of domestic miniatures, Agnello Hornby's second novel The Marchesa (translated by Alastair McEwen; Penguin, £7.99) paints a broader canvas. A generational saga set during the last years of the 19th-century Risorgimento (the political and social process that unified the disparate states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of Italy), it describes an aristocratic world losing ground to the Mafia and the middle classes.

The novel was directly inspired by the life of one of Agnello Hornby's distant relatives - her great-grandfather's sister, a marchesa with a quixotic reputation. "When I was a child," she says, "I would stay at my grandfather's palazzo in the small town of Siculiana. Each of my grandfather's six brothers had a flat there. I was allowed to go up and down between floors, and loved to listen to my great-aunts' conversation: gossip, cattiness, complaints and repetitions. Whenever there was a woman who was ugly, dirty, unkempt, greedy or stupid, one of them would say: 'She's like the marchesa'."

Her interest was further pricked by Luigi Pirandello's novel The Three Widows, loosely based on the marchesa's life. "The story Pirandello tells is partly true," she says. "La zia marchesa took into her home her husband's lover, and their bastard child. But I got quite cross about the way he talked about her. She was red-headed and considered ugly on account of that. She spoke Sicilian and not Italian. She liked to cook, and did so as a married woman. She liked the company of servants." In her novel, the much-maligned marchesa is re-invented as a victim of a dynastic system that couldn't accommodate misfits or women who didn't know their place. Married to a dissolute marchese, Costanza Safamita lives a life dominated by sexual jealousy and fear.

Agnello Hornby says her novel - an intimate portrait of the dying days of feudalism - captures a world that hasn't entirely vanished. "I think people are very snob," she says. "It is partly the fault of [Lampedusa's novel] The Leopard, which glorified the figure of the Prince."

No Sicilian writer can escape comparisons with Lampedusa, but Agnello Hornby shrugs off any parallels. "I think Lampedusa was a conceited man," she says. "I knew him as a child. He was the friend of one of my grandfather's brothers. He was a very quiet man, an intellectual. His life was ruined by an oppressive mother. Although he was distraught by his lack of wealth, he never tried to make it. As chairman of the Red Cross he did pretty much nothing, for which I am very angry."

Although she hasn't lived in Sicily since the Sixties, Agnello Hornby says that she doesn't feel like an outsider. "When I go back, I fit in beautifully. But London is my home. I didn't find the transition hard. The English are very similar to Sicilians: they are conceited, think they're different, and know their boundaries."

Unlike Lampedusa, who claimed to have read most of English literature, Agnello Hornby says her formative influences were a hit-and-miss affair. As a young girl, one of her summer jobs was to "beat the books" in her grandmother's library. Permitted to dust, but not to read the family's eclectic collection - which included her uncles' "naughty books" - she confined herself to speed-reading the prefaces. She has fond memories of an eye-watering introduction to the collected works of Oscar Wilde.

Agnello Hornby says that she is now addicted to writing, and even wonders if it's too late to go on a creative-writing course. A woman of great energy, she works at night when she can't be interrupted by phone calls from her clients or the court. "I write partly in English and partly in Italian. I write eight drafts. I never have any problems with the plot."

Agnello Hornby's latest novel, Boccamurata (which translates as "Sealed Lips"), was published in Italy earlier this year. Set in the present day, Agnello Hornby describes it as a love story between an adult brother and an adult sister. Incest is a hard subject to swallow in Catholic Italy where, she says, the novel has been "criticised like hell". In a sea of lukewarm reviews the one shining light was a glowing review in the arch-conservative publication Famiglia Cattolica. "They can't have read it!" she chuckles.

"Love is love, however misguided," she says. "All my novels are great love stories." She puts her foot down, however, at the word romance. "Romanticism is escapism, romanticism doesn't last. I like things to last."

Divorced more than 20 years ago, she says she's too much of a Catholic to ever remarry while her ex-husband is still alive. "I've had affairs. Lovely affairs. That's part of my family tradition. Lovers, but not husbands." Catholicism for Agnello Hornby, like most Sicilians, is a tribal rather than a theological affair.

As is evident from her child-friendly flat, being a mother and a grandmother is as central to Agnello Hornby as writing or even the law. She spends her Saturdays entertaining her four grandchildren, otherwise known as the "Hornbini".

Despite her late-life literary success, she is as unfazed by her new career as her grown-up sons. "Quite honestly, I can't understand the fuss. It's a book. You write it, it goes to the publisher, to the reader. I'm a better lawyer than a writer. With the law I do 'micro' good. With a book... I'm not so sure."

Biography

Simonetta Agnello Hornby

Simonetta Agnello Hornby was born in Palermo in 1945. A Fulbright scholar at the University of Kansas, she completed her law studies in England. In 1978 she set up Hornby and Levy, a practice specialising in childcare and domestic violence. In 1999 she was appointed part-time chairman of the Tribunal of Special Educational Needs and Disability. Her fiction debut, The Almond Picker, was published in 2002 (and later by Penguin in the UK); it was followed by The Marchesa, now translated by Alastair McEwen for Penguin. Her new novel, Boccamurata ("Sealed Lips"), was published in Italy earlier this year. Her novels have been translated into 18 languages. Divorced, the mother of two grown-up sons, and with four grandchildren, she has a flat near Westminster Cathedral in central London.

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