Joanna Campbell

Joanna Campbell writes fiction about families, divided loyalties, and the long effects of European history. Tying Down the Lion, her debut novel, follows the Bishop family on a road trip from England to Berlin in the summer of 1967. Roy drives the battered Morris, while his German wife Bridget, their daughter Jacqueline, and Roy's prejudiced mother Nell bring unresolved tensions into the car. Jacqueline's observations expose how private suspicion and public history overlap as the family crosses a continent still marked by the Second World War and the Cold War division of Berlin. Brick Lane Publishing released the novel in 2015, after Campbell developed it from her short story A Temporary Uprooting. Its movement between warmth, humor, bigotry, and reconciliation establishes concerns she later revisited in Instructions for the Working Day, another novel shaped by Germany's divided past. Campbell treats the journey as more than a route to a destination: confinement tests what the Bishops believe about one another and whether inherited hostility can loosen.