Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen was born in Hampshire in 1775, the seventh child and youngest daughter of George Austen, rector of Deane and Steventon, and his wife, Cassandra. She began writing poems, plays and stories for her family from a young age, and her first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, was released by Thomas Egerton to sell-out acclaim in 1811. Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815) followed, and these were the last of Austen’s works to come out in her lifetime. Her novels, including the posthumously published Northanger Abbey (1818) and Persuasion (1818), are today considered amongst the finest in the English language. She died at Winchester in 1817.
Val Mcdermid is an award-winning crime writer with over 27 novels to her name, translated into over 40 languages. She grew up in Fife, and after a career in newspaper journalism in Glasgow and Manchester, she published her first crime novel, Report for Murder, in 1987. Notable among her books are The Mermaids Singing (1995) which won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger award; A Place of Execution (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and The Grave Tattoo (2006), winner of the Portico Prize for Fiction. She was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger award in 2010, in recognition of her work.