Annabelle Thorpe

After twenty-five years as an award-winning travel and features journalist, writing for The Times and many other national broadsheets and magazines, Annabelle made the transition to fiction with The People We Were Before, the tale of a young boy and his family living through the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The book was born of her experiences in travelling to Croatia for over thirty years, and witnessing the country's spectacular fall and rise. Her second novel, What Lies Within, tells the story of a couple, Paul and Freya, who relocate to Marrakech, and explores the challenges of living in an unfamiliar culture.

Her new novel The Enemy of Love is set in Italy during the time of Mussolini's removal from power and the armistice with the Allies, and will be published in April 2023. The first of a series, the novel tells the story of two Umbrian families, the Capaldis and the di Lucas, and the struggle to maintain their lives, loves and businesses through the trauma of war and the Nazi occupation.

As a travel writer, she has visited over 60 countries, including driving through the Omani desert, trekking in the New Zealand rainforest, learning (and failing) to sail in Bermuda and narrowly escaping being run over in Tripoli. Her fiction brings in locations she knows intimately; Croatia in The People We Were Before, Marrakech and Qatar in her second, and Rome and Umbria in The Enemy of Love.

Follow Annabelle on Twitter @annabellet

Or drop by www.annabellethorpe.co.uk