THE best-selling romantic novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin may have put Louis de Bernieres on the literary map – but it's been difficult for the author to move on from that early success.

"I'm just waiting for the refreshing time when people don't mention Captain Corelli's Mandolin when they are interviewing me," he smiles.

The 53-year-old award-winning writer, who took 10 years to write another novel after Corelli, which was made into a film starring Nicolas Cage, recalls: "After Captain Corelli I got a fit of writer's stroppiness. I felt I had the world looking over my shoulder and it was irritating.

"I was all that time working on the next novel, Birds Without Wings, but never very flat out. I finally wrote most of it in the few months when I was expecting my first child because I knew that after he was born I wouldn't get much time."

His latest novel, A Partisan's Daughter, is an unusual love story about Chris, a middle-aged salesman trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage in the 1970s, who one night invites a prostitute into his car.

Roza is Yugoslavian, recently moved to London, and the daughter of one of Tito's partisans. She proceeds to tell him tales of danger, romance and tragedy from her life.

You never really know if she's telling the truth, but Chris is mesmerised anyway.

Another character in the book, 'Bob Dylan Upstairs', who lives in Roza's building, is modelled on de Bernieres when he was in his 20s.

"Bob Dylan Upstairs was me in 1979. I was living in exactly that house with pretty much that woman, who used to collar me and tell me her stories. She was very fascinating and quite scary," he said.

"I wrote all her stories down. I never really found a way of turning it into a good novel, because it was just one thing after another. Finally I came up with a plot in the form of Chris."

He grew up in Surrey, boarded at prep and public schools and signed up with the army as a teenager – but only lasted four months.

He studied philosophy at Manchester University instead and went off to Colombia to teach, became a cowboy in Argentina for a while and had a succession of jobs back in England, including as a car mechanic and landscape gardener.

His experiences in South America gave him the inspiration for his first three novels before his fourth, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, put him on the best-sellers list.

The author lives in Norfolk with his partner, actress and director Cathy Gill, and two children, Robin, three, and four-week-old Sophie.

He has always preferred to stay out of the limelight, even when Captain Corelli was at its peak. "I'm happy to be well known but I don't want to be a celebrity. I absolutely determined not to mess up my life by doing that. And anyway, I'm not young, beautiful and slim," he said.