Joanna Trollope has been writing for over thirty years and is well known for her enormously successful contemporary works of fiction. She has been described as one of the most insightful chroniclers and social commentators writing fiction today.

She is the author of over 20 highly acclaimed and bestselling novels, including The Rector's Wife, Marrying the Mistress, Daughters in Law and City of Friends. Born in her grandfather’s rectory in the Cotswold village of Minchinhampton Joanna says:

Being born somewhere with a strong local sense, like the Cotswolds, gave me not just a sense of rootedness, but a capacity to vakue landscape and weather and the accessible richness of community life.”

After winning a scholarship to Oxford University, Joanna joined the Foreign Office and then became a teacher of English. She began writing “to fill the long spaces after the children had gone to bed”‘and for many years combined her writing career with working as a teacher. In 2014, she updated Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility as the opening novel in the Austen Project.

Her latest novel, Mum & Dad, tells the story of Gus and Monica who abandoned England 25 years ago to build a new life in southern Spain, starting a vineyard and a wine business. Then Gus, in his early 70s, has a sudden stroke, and his and Monica’s three adult children have to ride to the rescue. As these children descend on the bodega, each one has a different view of both the situation and its solution. Age-old resentments surface, aggravated by new and unbearable tensions. Can the family, as a family, ever survive?