Joan Brady, who won the Whitbread Prize in 1992 for The Theory of War, said she was so overcome by chemicals from the Conker shoe shop next door that she could manage only a plot for a murder-mystery book.

“It is much easier to write a thriller, and I was so angry that it was therapeutic to write about murder and blood,” she said. “I had a mad desire to stick in the names (of the shoe manufacturers), but I don’t want a libel suit as well.”

Prem Ash, a partner at the Conker in Totnes, Devon, denied that there had been a leakage of fumes and accused Ms Brady of waging a hate campaign against her shop.

“Tests by environmental health officers have shown there has never been a leakage of fumes of any sort,” she said. “This is a campaign against us by Ms Brady because she does not like us.”

Ms Brady is now suing the Conker for personal injury after being told that she was suffering from toxic peripheral neuropathy, a chemically induced condition that has made her hands and feet numb.

“It crippled me completely,” she said. “My hands are better now but I can’t feel my feet the way normal people do. At times the fumes were more than I could take.

“They made my eyes burn and face sweat. It was extraordinary.”

Her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, remains unwritten and instead she is finishing Bleed Out, which will be published next year.

Ms Ash, who has referred the matter to her insurers’ solicitors, said the shop had been given a clean bill of health by inspectors from the local authority and the fire brigade.

“It is a neighbourhood war,” she said, adding that there was a longrunning dispute between them ever since Mrs Brady removed a staircase that acted as the factory’s fire escape, which is on her property, and replaced it with a ladder.

“We use the least-toxic glues we can find. We see ourselves as an ethical business and always have done.” She contested Ms Brady’s claim that glue had caused her condition.

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