York author Donna Hay hopes her latest book won't generate quite the publicity her last one did. STEPHEN LEWIS finds out why.

LIFE'S more interesting than fiction, they like to say.

When her last novel came out, York author Donna Hay found that out to her cost.

Goodbye Ruby Tuesday was a modern comedy about successful 30-something London management consultant Roo (for Ruby) Hennessey and her single-parent mum Sadie - failed nightclub singer and goodtime girl in fictional northern town Normanford.

The plot focused on the fraught relationship between the two equally strong and bloody-minded but very different women.

To help promote it, Donna's publicists thought it would be a good idea for her to write a piece for a national newspaper about her relationship with her own mum. Reluctantly, she did - and, in her own words, "all hell broke loose".

Donna's story was newspaper dynamite. She was brought up the daughter of a working-class South London family. And it wasn't until she was in her mid-teens that she realised the people she thought of as her parents were actually her grandparents - and her 'big sister' was her mum.

She'd got used to the fact her 'mum' was older than any of her schoolfriends' mums. And she just thought the strange 30-something man who used to visit occasionally and liked to take her out was a friend of the family.

As she got older, she even began to think he was a bit creepy. Then one Sunday, after he'd brought her home after a day out, he took her aside. "He said: 'I've got something to tell you. I'm your dad'." Donna recalls.

It was, she says, a "horrible moment" - one she still remembers vividly to this day even though it was more than 30 years ago. Suddenly, everything clicked into place in her head. Her 'parents' were her grandparents; her 'sister' was her mum. She'd become pregnant by her boyfriend at 17 and, because attitudes to single mums were very different back in the 1960s, her grandparents brought her up as their own.

Her family never discussed it openly. Donna continued to think of her grandparents as her parents, and only ever saw her real father once more.

But when her carefully-written piece appeared in The Times at the end of 2004, it sparked a media frenzy. She was reluctantly persuaded by her publicist to do an interview with the Daily Mail - better that than the News of the World, she says - and then she virtually had to go into hiding.

"When it the Daily Mail article came out, the phone didn't stop ringing. It was horrible! I was thinking 'this must be what it is like to be a celebrity, and every time you step out of the house there is somebody there photographing you," says Donna, who lives in Rawcliffe.

Maybe it's true that no publicity is bad publicity if you've got a book to sell: but Donna fervently hopes she doesn't have to go through that again with her new book.

Where Goodbye Ruby Tuesday was about the relationship between mothers and daughters, No Place For A Woman - out next week - explores the relationship between fathers and daughters.

Written with Donna's trademark light, comic touch, it is the story of two women - twentysomething Finn Delaney and Gina Tate, daughter of a rich property developer - and their struggles to make something of themselves in a man's world.

Finn wants nothing more than to join her dad Joe's construction business. However, widower Joe, who has spent his life trying to turn Finn into a little princess, tells her the building trade is no place for a woman.

So she starts leading a double life. When she leaves the house each day, Joe believes she's off to work in a beauty salon. In reality, she's donning a hard hat and going to work for rival property firm Tates.

Meanwhile, Gina Tate, daughter of Tates boss Max, has been brought up to be a trophy wife. Rich and spoiled, she has spent most of her life trying to please her father. When she loses her cinch of a job in the family business, she finds herself working for the Tates' arch rivals, the Delaneys, instead...

Donna, a journalist who began her career as a novelist by writing humorous romantic fiction, has always enjoyed writing about strong, spiky women characters. In this book, however, the two women characters have equally strong fathers to contend with.

She got the idea for the book, Donna says, after spotting a sign for Bullivant and Daughters butchers at the farmers' market in York.

"A butcher is a very traditional male occupation," she says, "and I wondered if he (Mr Bullivant) had no sons, and whether his daughters had to persuade him to take over the business."

In No Place For A Woman, Joe is desperate to hand on his family business to his wastrel of a son - unable to see that he has the perfect heir apparent in his daughter Finn.

There's not necessarily anything of her own relationship with her grandfather - the man she still thinks of as her father - in there, Donna says.

Or perhaps there is. "He was very traditional," she admits. "He never thought of women as having worthwhile careers. I told him on a couple of occasions what I did for a living but I think he went to his grave (when Donna was 22) thinking I was a printer. Being a journalist wasn't something that poor girls from south London did."

No Place For A Woman by Donna Hay is published next week by Orion, priced £9.99

Updated: 16:08 Friday, February 17, 2006