A.J. Blackwell

Most of us believe we choose our own lives. My books are about the moment that belief gives way, often for people of an age when nobody expects them to change course. They change it anyway, and I’m interested in what that costs and who sends the bill.

Authored by Others, the first of a trilogy, is set in Oxford’s literary world. Parallel Tracks, Learning Curves, Eventually You Will and What Folk Say are collections about ordinary people at the point where something shifts. The Incline follows one Wiltshire hillside from 1855 to the present. Darker work includes the thrillers of The Interference Protocol, The Other Versions of Us, and The Hazlecombe Lark, a Cotswold murder mystery.

Born in Nottinghamshire, I studied medicine, then spent my working life writing software, fourteen years of it in southern Italy. The stories began at school, where an English teacher, Mr Wells, first took them seriously. It has taken me rather longer than it should have to finish what he started.