FICTION · GENERAL
Sally Beauman
Also known as: Sally Kinsey-Miless Beauman Howard, Sally Beauman
Sally Kinsey-Miles was born on 25 July 1944 in Devon, England, UK. She graduated from Girton College, Cambridge (MA in English Literature) She married Christopher Beauman an economist. After graduating, she moved with her husband to the USA, where she lived for three years, first in Washington DC, then New York, and travelled extensively. She began her career as a journalist in America, joining the staff of the newly launched New York magazine, of which she became associate editor, and continued to write for it after her return to England. Interviewed Alan Howard for the Telegraph Magazine in 1970 in an article called 'A Fellow of Most Excellent Fancy'. (Daily Telegraph Supplement, May 29th.) Apparently a very long interview. The following year they met again, and the rest is history. After a long partnership Sally and Alan married in 2004. She has one son, James, and one grandchild. Sally has had a distinguished career as a journalist and critic, winning the Catherine Pakenham Award for her writing, and becoming the youngest-ever editor of Queen magazine (now Harper’s & Queen). She has contributed to many leading newspapers and magazines in both the UK and the USA, including the Daily Telegraph ( from 1970-73 and 1976-8 she was Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph Magazine), the Sunday Times, Observer, Vogue, the New York Times and the New Yorker. She also wrote nine Mills & Boon romances under the pseudonym Vanessa James, before publishing her block-buster novel Destiny in 1987 under her real name. It was her article about Daphne du Maurier, commissioned by Tina Brown, and published in The New Yorker in November 1993, which first gave her the idea for writing Rebecca de Winter’s version of events at Manderley – an idea that subsequently became the novel, Rebecca’s Tale. In 2000 she was one of the Whitbread Prize judges for the best novel category.
The seven-and-a-half-foot-tall monster in ring mail threw back his head, bared tusklike fangs, and roared.
— from Destiny
Most acclaimed
Rebecca's Tale
April 1951. It has been twenty years since the death of Rebecca, the hauntingly beautiful first wife of Maxim de Winter, and twenty years since Manderley, the de Winter family's estate, was destroyed by fire. But Rebecca's tale is just beginning. Colonel Julyan, an old family friend, receives an anonymous package concerning Rebecca. An inquisitive young scholar named Terence Gray appears and stirs up the quiet seaside hamlet with questions about the past and the close ties he soon forges with the Colonel and his eligible daughter, Ellie. Amid bitter gossip and murky intrigue, the trio begins a search for the real Rebecca and the truth behind her mysterious death.
Constance
"The cool, beautiful Constance Schuyler lives alone in Manhattan in the early 1960s. At a literary party, she meets Sidney Klein, a professor of poetry twenty years her senior. Sidney is a single father with a poor marital record, and he pursues Constance with relentless determination. Eventually she surrenders, accepts his marriage proposal, and moves, with some dread, into his dark, book-filled apartment. She can't settle in. She's tortured by memories of the bitterly unhappy childhood she spent with her father in a dilapidated house upstate. When she learns devastating new information about that past, Constance's fragile psyche suffers a profound shock. Her marriage, already tottering, threatens to collapse completely"--Amazon.com.
Dark Angel
If you don't know the show;: take one kick-ass, bike-riding genetically-modified girl, created in a government laboratory to become the perfect soldier.If you don't know the show;: take one kick-ass, bike-riding genetically-modified girl, created in a government laboratory to become the perfect soldier. Let her escape from the lab and put her on the streets. Throw in more genetically-modified 'siblings' who she tries to locate and pit them against sinister and corrupt government forces. Light torch paper, stand back.If you do know the show: this novel fills in some of the gaps from the ten years between Max's escape from Manticore in 2009 and her current adventures in Seattle in 2019. We meet for the first time Original Cindy, Sketchy, Kendra and Normal, as well as Lydecker and Logan Cale.We see Max working as a cat-burglar in Los Angeles, and then moving to Seattle where she meets various figures from her past and future, and gets involved with a multi-millionaire art collector. The book culminates in a thrilling confrontation at the top of the Seattle Space Needle, where one of Max's siblings dies in order to save her.