Home About the author   Words and pictures: (p.4) Woman in White (p.7) Stanley Spencer (p.31) Augustus John (p.41) Cranach 's Eve (p.140) Gainsborough (p.166) Mrs Dalloway (p.188) Lucio Fontana (p.264) Gwen John  Publisher and agent

Author Ann Bone started out on women's magazines. Her father was a journalist and early celebrity biographer, who came to England from Vienna before the war. Educated at Bedales, she married into a Hampstead family with strong Bloomsbury connections. While bringing up her children, she studied at the London School of Economics and then became a political scientist. In the 1980s she moved with a painter to south-west France and began to write fiction. She now lives in London and is writing her next novel. (The painting on the cover of the novel is John Atkinson Grimshaw, Autumn Gold, Hampstead (detail), 1880, oil on board, 43 x 35 cm © Sotheby's/AKG-images.)