Rosie thomas author biography assignment

Rosie Thomas was born and grew up in a small village in north Wales.

After winning a scholarship, she became a boarder at Howell’s School. The school had a strong tradition of music and games, but unfortunately Rosie had no aptitude for hockey and no enthusiasm for Gilbert and Sullivan choruses. She found the library instead … and read, and read. To feel an outsider and to be immersed in books was the ideal apprenticeship for a writer.

Rosie read English at St Hilda’s College Oxford, and for the first time in her life felt that she was in the right place at the right time. She still feels a debt to the remarkable women who taught her, and who encouraged her to think for herself.

After a few years of working in women’s magazines and for a publisher, and by now married to a literary agent, Rosie found herself at home with a new baby son and no job. To write a novel seemed the more promising of the options open to her.

Her first book was published in 1982, shortly after the birth of her daughter. She has been writing full time ever since, and that first novel has been followed by a score of others.

Rosie lives and writes in London, but she is also a keen traveller, mountaineer and skier. Among many adventures she has climbed in the Alps and the Himalayas, trekked in Pakistan, Ladakh and Bhutan, followed the Silk Route through Asia, worked on a research station in Antarctica, sailed the Atlantic, explored in Chile, and competed in a classic car rally from Peking to Paris. Most recently she has sailed the southern ocean from Falklands to South Georgia and then crossed the island in the footsteps of Sir Ernest Shackleton.

Rosie believes now that her travelling and writing are interdependent, and that one informs and enables the other.

All along the road there are stories, waiting to be told.

Among her other interests, Rosie has been a Trustee of the London Library and of the facial reconstruction charity Saving Faces. She has chaired the Betty

All twenty novels have been repackaged with smart new cover artwork, and are – or soon will be – available in both physical and digital form. See individual titles below. As a lover of physical books I recommend you try your local bookshop or library, but if you draw a blank they are available from Amazon through the links below.

Daughter of the House.

London 1919. The Great War is over and London lies on the brink of an uncertain future. With the misery of war in the past, hope begins to emerge for the women who have waited at home. Nancy Wix is just such a woman. Born into a down-at-heel theatrical family, Nancy has always known that the visions she has seen since she was a child will set her apart from her peers. A chance encounter with a gifted medium reveals a way in which she might save her family’s theatre – for this is the age of Spiritualism, and Nancy’s gift will her see her star rise at a time when bereaved families are desperate to hold on to their dead sons.

As the roaring Twenties dawn, Nancy strives to break free from the rigid bonds of society and find her own place. The only thing that could hold her back is her love for an unattainable man…

Click here to buy

The Illusionists

London in 1885 is a threatening place for a young woman of limited means. Eliza’s choices lie between marriage and stifling domesticity, or a downwards spiral to the streets. But Eliza is modern before her time and she won’t compromise.

At a run-down theatre she meets Devil Wix – a charismatic showman who is set on running his own company. His right-hand man is Carlo Boldoni, an irascible dwarf whose dazzling talent eclipses everything Devil tries to do. Forever linked to Devil by a boyhood tragedy is Jasper Button, a gifted artist, and the fourth member of this strange crew is Heinrich, an enigmatic engineer. As the seductive and dangerous world of the Palmyra Theatre snares them all, it falls to Eliza to try to keep