Beyond the Book: Background information when reading Holy Fools

Beyond the Book

This article relates to Holy Fools

Joanne Harris was born in Yorkshire in 1964, the daughter of a French mother and an English father. Her first novel, The Evil Seed, was published in 1989, although she strongly advises against reading it! Since then she has written; Sleep, Pale Sister (1993); Chocolat (1999); Blackberry Wine (2000); Five Quarters of the Orange (2001), Coastliners (2002), The French Kitchen (2002), Holy Fools (2003) and Jigs and Reels (2004).

Her next book, Gentlemen and Players, is scheduled for October 2005. The Latin master, a well known eccentric and veteran of St Oswald's grammar school for boys is finally contemplating retirement - but beneath the little rivalries, petty disputes and everyday crises of the School, a darker undercurrent stirs.

Before being able to turn to writing full time, Harris taught in a boys grammar school in the North of England for 12 years. She now lives in Yorkshire, England, with her husband and daughter, Anouchka, and is apparently at work on a fantasy novel for children called Runemarks, which she says she has been working on 'as much for my own pleasure as for Anouchka's, but that no-one else has seen yet'.

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This article relates to Holy Fools. It first ran in the May 18, 2005 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.