Lesley Pearse

Lesley Pearse is a British bestselling novelist known for emotionally charged family sagas and historical fiction centred on women overcoming poverty, violence, betrayal and social exclusion. Born in Rochester, Kent, she spent part of her childhood in a children’s home after the death of her mother. She did not publish her first novel until she was forty-eight, but went on to sell more than ten million books worldwide. Her fiction draws on a varied life that included work as a dressmaker, shopkeeper and nightclub employee.

Her novels include Never Look Back, Remember Me, Hope, Gypsy, Belle, The Promise, Survivor and Dead to Me. Many move between Britain, Europe, Australia and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, combining historical events with stories of migration, war, crime and personal reinvention. Pearse is particularly associated with resilient female protagonists whose lives expose the limited choices available to women in earlier periods.