about

Penelope Evans 

Beyond the Books

Penelope Evans was born in Wales but grew up in Scotland and Switzerland, leaving her with no clear idea of where she belonged. Which is possibly why all through her childhood she wrote stories filled with time travelling children puzzled by the present, yet completely at home in the future. And the Past.

After studying Classics, then Law, she practised as a criminal barrister in London and married another lawyer. In the early nineties she took a year out to have a baby and nine months later produced a daughter and a book. Apparently the future was to be anything but legal.

Shortly after she repeated the process. But now she was remembering those children who travelled through time. It was happening right now, before her eyes with her own children. She stayed the same while they changed. Babies, toddlers, young teenagers, they altered the meaning of Time. She wrote to catch up with them, and if you ask her now, she will tell you her books are the milestones counting off their lives.

For example - Freezing has a three year old child who threads her way through the plot, haunting Stewart the young man trying to find her.

In First Fruits, a collection of teenagers are bewildered by the lies the adults tell.

In A Fatal Reunion a man is trying to keep the love and respect not only of his wife, but his twelve year old son.

In My Perfect Silence, a little girl grows up and grows older in the shadow of her older brother, her wall against the world.

In The Last Girl an old man does his best to break the tie between a mother and her daughter, knowing in that way he will have her completely in his power.

Densely plotted, often frightening, her books seem to be about crime and the adults who commit them. But if you know how to read them, if you follow the clues, you will see they are all about children and the people they are in danger of  becoming. They hold the key.

She now lives in Buckinghamshire with her husband and two daughters. Her sixth book "Saving Grace" is published by Allison & Busby in July 2007.

Comment

"Penelope Evans has established herself as a master of psychological suspense . . . [She] is simply brilliant."-Tom Savage, The Inheritance

"Crawls with creeping menace…Penelope Evans builds the tension and suspense of this chilling tale right up until the last line on the last page." - Time Out

"A skilful exercise in suspense…Sad, funny and frightening...."- The Times