Born in Lancashire, Freda Lightfoot has been a teacher, bookseller and in a mad moment, a smallholder on the freezing fells of the Lake District where she tried her hand at the ‘good life’, kept sheep and hens, planted a small wood and even learned how to make jam. She has now given up her thermals and built a house in an olive grove in Spain, where she produces her own olive oil and sits in the sun on the rare occasions she is not writing, but still likes to spend the rainy summers in the UK. She has published 40 novels including many bestselling family sagas and historical novels.