Me, my book and incest

Anna Stothard is being touted as the Next Big Thing and shows every sign of becoming it. She is the daughter of the former editor of The Times, Sir Peter Stothard, and novelist Sally Emerson; her godmother is Tina Brown (former Vanity Fair and Talk editor). Plus she is awfully pretty, gained three As at A-level and, at 19, is shortly to go to Oxford. She has also already written several (very good) columns for The Observer, partied in Cornwall with Prince William, and is now about to publish her first novel.

Here the picture abruptly darkens, because her book, Isabel and Rocco, is about, gulp, incest - specifically incest between a brother and a sister who live with their parents in Camden. Anna, as it happens, lives with her parents in Camden. Has she, um, got a brother? "Yes. I have a little brother, Michael. He's 15." And, erm, what's he like? "He's great. He's dead sociable. He can make me laugh more than anyone. We get on remarkably well." Right. "But of course it's not true," Anna cries, darting back to the subject matter of her book. "I would never do something like that." She bites her lip. "I know everyone will think I have." On the book cover, there's a picture of a girl taking her top off. "It's so obviously not me, but every boy I show it to looks downward and says, 'So Anna, is that you?' 'No!'"

The novel is about how Isabel and Rocco become unnaturally close and dependent on each other when their father is diagnosed with Aids and their mother devotes herself to nursing him. It describes with child's-eye accuracy their parents' sex life and violent rows. It is genuinely good, but you can't help wondering what her dad made of it. "Oh, he was very disturbed by it. He came out of his study looking really white," she replies blithely. "It was all the little things in it, the bits that connected to our lives, descriptions of bits of our house, woven into this horrible story about Aids and incest, that upset him."

But did he wonder where the idea for the novel came from? "He probably did. Yeah. But he's just going to have to get over it." Her mum was fine with it. "She read it first and was very helpful. I think she's proud of me. I mean, her own books are fairly dark and disturbing."

Hmm. I don't think Anna grasps how grim her book is. Her father's reaction was probably quite healthy. Why would a teenager want to write about two children so oppressed by gloomy, violent, absent parents that they want to have sex with each other? He must have wondered what he'd done wrong. But Stothard seems cool about her rather extraordinary novel.

The idea for the incest came from a girl she knew who "flirted with her brother. It was horrible. I think she was 11 or 12, and there were rumours that they had slept together".

That aside, the book clearly has an autobiographical streak: she began it when her father became ill with cancer during her GCSEs. He was "very bad", she admits, turning away her glossy, oval eyes. "He had chemotherapy and an operation. He lost his hair." So, perhaps the overall mood of abandonment and unhappiness was what she was feeling at the time. The one good thing about her father's illness was that he took a sabbatical. While editing The Times he would get home at 10pm, eat, have a shower and go to bed. After he got the tumour, the family saw much more of him - "which was nice, even though he was very ill. He wasn't working so much and he didn't go back to working so much [he now edits The Times Literary Supplement]. He seems on top form now, better than he has for a long time. He's much more laid-back. He has long lunches, blows in at 6pm, has dinner with us and judges poetry competitions."

Stothard was at The Times for the first eight years of Anna's life. Then, when he was made Washington correspondent, the family decamped to America for three years. According to Anna, their home in America was weird and falling apart. She elaborates: "We got it really cheaply because a guy had hanged himself in my parents' room. Apparently, Michael and I would never go in there." When Anna was 11 they returned to London and Stothard continued to climb the corporate ladder, until becoming editor of The Times in 1992.

I ask what he is like. "God, he's going to read this," she murmurs. "Well ..." A long pause. "... for a long time I didn't quite click with Dad because he's very clever and when I was little I would just nod, 'Yes, Daddy.' But when I got closer to him, I realised he's really interesting. He's quite intellectual. He did classics. And my mother can be a real laugh if you get her in the right mood. She's the kind of mum who, if you come downstairs wearing a jumper, jeans and no make-up, will send you back upstairs to put on lipstick."

Anna is stuck with the "daughter of " label, and there's no doubt her father's job has given her a boost. Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell and Iain Duncan Smith all trooped to a family party last March.

At Oxford, Anna thinks she might do journalism, as her mother did. She sucks on her cigarette. "I just want to meet some good people. Lots of my friends are up there already." She means her mates from St Paul's and Westminster. She laughs with real amusement when I ask if her friends take drugs. "Of course! There's a lot of cocaine in Oxford. And pills and everything. Most of my male friends are highly into them." She stubs out her Marlboro Light.

She adds she had just spent three months in Beijing while on her gap year, "living with two American guys, who smoked so much pot it was unimaginable. There were cockroaches everywhere." Aren't her parents strict? "They were always fairly blasé. As long as I'm safe, and back when I say, then they have no cause to worry."

She then begins telling hair-raising tales of teenagers getting "off their faces" in Rock, Cornwall, where she holidayed after her GCSEs. This is where she met Prince William. She grins at the idea that she might have fancied him or Harry. "No. They're too baby-faced. They look a bit like girls. They're all blond and sweet." The kind of boys she goes for, she says, are "guys whose eyes light up when they talk about something, guys who have passion". She has just such a boyfriend at the moment, a 26-year-old called Joe. But he's just moved to Paris. "We've always been together, but not, if you see what I mean." She is equally vague about what he does. "He was a journalist, then he worked for a movie producer and now he's researching."

Her book seems like the work of a girl who isn't madly happy. Her father's Times era must have brought its own tensions, then there was her mother's affair with Douglas Adams (of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fame). Slightly embarrassed, she says: "My parents broke up at one point a year after they were married," she says. "My mum left Dad. And then came back to him." And then she was born? "And then I was born. The making of me!"

Isabel and Rocco, Arrow, £6.99, is published on 3 April.