Frances Quinn is the author of four historical novels, The Smallest Man, That Bonesetter Woman, The Lost Passenger and The Troublemakers, set respectively against the backgrounds of the English Civil War, Georgian London, the Titanic and early 20th century New York, and the beginning of women’s football in Victorian England.

She studied English at King’s College Cambridge, after realising too late that the course required more than lying around reading novels for three years. She then worked as a journalist and copywriter, writing for magazines, newspapers and big brands. This proved to be valuable experience when she turned to fiction, honing the skills of making every word count, and catching and keeping a reader’s attention.

Frances is interested in a wide range of historical periods and settings and enjoys working with authors on how to bring their setting alive and be true to the period, while still allowing character and story to shine through. She’s especially keen to help authors who want to make their novels compelling enough to hook an agent and a publishing deal, or to make a real success of self-publishing.

Frances lives very happily by the sea in Brighton, so she’s keen not to be stranded on a desert island. But if the worst were to happen, the books she would rescue as the ship went down are The Vizard Mask by Diana Norman and People Like Us by Louise Fein (published as Daughter of the Reich in the US). The first, set in London at the time of the Great Plague, is a blueprint for creating vivid, believable characters and weaving in period detail without it ever feeling like a history lesson. The second, set in 1930s Austria as the Nazis rose to power, is a superb example of historical fiction that sheds light on the present as well as the past, and a masterclass in raising the stakes for your characters so the reader just can’t stop turning the pages.