Libby Purves's new novel is set in Oxford, a city she knew as a student and journalist, writes ANDREW FFRENCH

In Radio: A True Love Story, Libby Purves recalled fondly her time as a reporter at Radio Oxford in the early 1970s. Now, in her latest novel, Love Songs and Lies, the St Anne's College graduate has returned to the city for the bittersweet tale of undergraduate Sally's love affairs, and how she copes with the responsibilities of adulthood.

Sally's story is entwined with two brothers who share her student home in Oxford. She worships one of them but he does not feel quite the same way. Then she marries his brother and forms a successful songwriting partnership, but this is not an entirely happy union either.

Finally, Sally has more luck with another undergraduate, who sings in the choir and never goes out without an umbrella, but she finds it difficult to communicate with her daughter, and this prompts a dramatic family showdown in the US.

Sally's story perhaps sounds no more dramatic than many life histories but, as the decades pass, her revelations continue to keep the reader gripped.

Libby, who lives in Suffolk with her husband Paul Heiney, has written ten novels but her latest presented a new challenge. Sally's story is told in the first person, a narrative technique that initially "terrified" the writer, but it was a discipline she eventually came to enjoy.

The shabby canalside house Sally shares with two girl undergraduates and Max, who becomes the father of one of her children is, Libby confided, supposed to be in Upper Fisher Row, off Hythe Bridge Street. The broadcaster admitted that Sally's experiences of living out are based partly on her own.

"Our house was in Cobden Crescent in Grandpont - we were one of the first mixed houses - you had to get special permission for that in those days," she told The Oxford Times.

"The man who moved in said he would bring the coal in for us but, of course, he never did. I have amalgamated Sally's experiences with my own. When the estate agent tried to sell our house we would lift up the floorboards and show potential buyers the water underneath.

"We were fairly broke as students but not in debt. You would be lectured by your bank manager if there was £30 of your Blackwell's bill to pay at the end of term."

This nostalgic novel might have been written before now, but the broadcaster's two children were both students at Oxford and Libby was anxious not to reminisce about the good old days every time she came to visit.

At a later date, Love Song and Lies gave her the opportunity to recall what it was like to be a student herself in the city in the early 1970s.

She said: "I love wandering about Oxford, seeing the ghosts of the old places. Cobden Crescent has very much changed - it has become very gentrified but some places are still the same." "We would buy potatoes from the shop on Folly Bridge and the old lady running it would say 'Don't you know any other way but to bake them?'"

While Libby acknowledged the autobiographical elements in her novel, she was quick to point out that student Sally is not to be confused with her.

"I was worried that people would think 'What a cow'. Sally does have a lot of growing up to do in the book and I had to throw myself totally into that deluded girl.

"I was a lovesick thing as a student with totally unsuitable men. I did a lot of yearning for completely the wrong guys - several of whom are gay?.

"I am not a vicar's daughter like Sally, but I got incredibly, deeply immersed in my course. Studying English at Oxford was more intense than any relationship."

Libby said her latest novel should not be classified as an 'Aga saga'.

"I have no desire to push back the frontiers of the novel but I do try to write decent English," she said. "I adore Jilly Cooper but I just can't bring myself to write like that. I suppose my novels are slightly more at the literary end of the market."

Although Sally's path through life moves out of Oxford to London, and then the US. She returns to Oxford at the end of the novel to visit her son at college and it is the canalside house that is the novel's most memorable location. She captures perfectly the students' struggle to stay warm as the fog from the River Thames enshrouds their terraced home.

"I spent a lot of time mooching by the river when I was at Radio Oxford and got lots of good stories from it." For one of those radio stories in the 1970s, she climbed hundreds of feet up a ladder to interview a crane driver in his cab during the building of the Westgate Centre. Now she is striving to reach new literary heights and her next novel could present an even tougher challenge - writing from a young man's point of view.

Love Songs and Lies by Libby Purves is published by Hodder, price £14.99. The author will be talking about her novels at the Upper Library, Christ Church, on Sunday, March 25, at 10am. Tickets cost £7.50.