HAVE YOU EVER had to climb upstairs on your hands and knees the day after a particularly gruelling training session? No? Oh, okay. Me neither.

We’re all familiar with that post-training muscle pain which occurs in the days following one’s exertions. They call it DOMS – Delayed Onset Muscle Stiffness, although back in the day, we all believed it to be caused by lactic acid.

What we now know is that the pain is caused by microscopic tears in muscle fibres caused by intense or new exercises. The damage triggers a healing response in your body during which the muscle tissue is flooded with white blood cells, which strengthen and repair the area, making it more resilient to future strain. So yes – repairing the damage is what makes you stronger.

Thea, the main character in my new book All Of Them Lied, has survived a devastating cliff fall while on a walking holiday in Italy with the four people she loves most in the world.

Her injuries are extensive: a fractured pelvis, tibia and fibula, abdominal injuries, a shoulder dislocation, some traumatic brain injury. We meet her when she comes back home from hospital, and she’s trying to rebuild her life, learning to walk again, to become independent and, crucially for the story, struggling to remember what happened.

Learning to walk again after injury is incredibly painful. I know, because I’ve now had to do this twice. When I was 11, I had an operation to remove........

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