As a young woman Jo Eames harboured two ambitions — she wanted to be a lawyer and she also wanted to be a novelist. Jo achieved the first with ease and practised the law until she was 30, when she became involved in running and developing Peach Pubs with her husband Hamish Stoddart and Lee Cash. She is now the pub company’s wine buyer.

Her second ambition was not quite so easily achieved, but after several rewrites, a great deal of midnight oil and dedicated research, she has published her first novel, The Faithless Wife.

That Jo should achieve her second goal came as no surprise to Barry Simner, her one-time tutor at the Arvon Foundation. He says that he noticed her writing talent within moments of reading the work she submitted while attending one of his writing workshops. He said: “You know immediately if a writer has that special something. You get a tingle in the spine as you read their work.”

He describes Jo’s writing as both intelligent and sensuous — an unusual combination. “Actually, she has a formidable intelligence and is stylistically sensual — on reading just a few pages of her work, it was obvious it was written by someone who not only loved language but knew how to use it effectively.”

The Faithless Wife is set on a Balearic island during the 1930s Spanish Civil War.

It begins in the present day, introducing us to Kate, who is running away from her family in England. She has chosen Menorca as her hide-out because she frequently visited this beautiful Spanish island as a child. It seems to her to be a good place to die. One stormy day, mesmerised by the waves, she catches sight of a body.

Eventually, we realise that the corpse is someone she knows. As she makes friends with a local boy, rescuing his boat from a storm, the present-day story is entwined with the tale of a tragedy that happened during the civil war. Jo said she had given her story a shifting perspective because she wanted to add complexity to the novel and challenge the reader.

When asked why she chose to centre her first book on the Spanish Civil War, Jo explains that she discovered a hole in history, and wondered why this should be.

When searching through files linked with the island, she found nothing on the years between 1936 and 1939 — apart from one paper stating that sales of marcasite jewellery had fallen — despite the fact that the island had been through the most tumultuous period of its history. This excited Jo’s curiosity and so the idea for a story took shape. She formed her characters by watching the people on the island. “I didn’t talk to them, I just observed them,” she said. So why did she set her first novel in Spain when she is not Spanish, and why choose a period she has not lived through?

Jo stressed that she did not want to write a trendy novel that reflects our lives now and she certainly didn’t want to write chick-lit. “When I read a novel I want to read what I don’t know. I want the book to take me into a different world, so using my imagination I wrote for readers like me, who want to be transported into a different realm.”

Jo accepts that her book will not be backed up by a big marketing campaign. It will have to rely on word of mouth if it is to succeed. She says its publication is a testament to the power of friendship.

“All those people at Peach were amazing. They never let me give up, they were with me every inch of the way.”

Her husband Hamish has been equally supportive, organising little breaks for her where she can write in peace.

Jo is now working on her second book, which will centre on a remarkable Major General whom she feels deserves centre stage in a novel.

l The Faithless Wife by Jo Eames is produced by Peach Publishing at £9.99. It is available at all 13 Peach pubs and at independent bookshops, with £1 of each sale donated to cancer research.