Deborah Lawrenson

Deborah Lawrenson spent her childhood moving around the world with diplomatic service parents, from Kuwait to China, Belgium, Luxembourg and Singapore. She read English at Cambridge University and worked as a journalist in London. She has written eight novels and her writing is praised for its vivid sense of place. The Art of Falling was a WHSmith Fresh Talent pick in 2005. The Lantern was published to critical acclaim in the USA, chosen for the Channel4 TV Book Club in the UK and shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2012. Her novel 300 Days of Sun, which is set in Portugal and was selected as a Great Group Read for the WNBA National Reading Group Month in October 2016 in the USA.

Serena Kent

Deborah is now also writing as Serena Kent, with her husband Robert Rees.

Deborah and Rob met at Cambridge where he studied science and philosophy, played the piano and composed songs before going into banking. They have a daughter and live in Kent in a house full of books, and a ramshackle old farmhouse on the slopes of the Luberon hills in Provence. Writing the Penelope Kite mysteries began as a joke, a joint effort to make some money to buy cypress trees for the garden in France. Penelope, an Englishwoman of a certain age – though forever young at heart – sprang to life fully formed over glasses of rosé on the terrace and too much delicious pâtisserie…