ABOUT THE AUTHOR

L.D. Sharpe has loved books for as long as she can remember – stories of adventure, of weird and wonderful places, and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. She studied languages and philosophy at university and then joined the Department for International Development (DFID), where she spent time in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, China and Sierra Leone. She left DFID to work for Her Majesty Queen Rania in Jordan, while spending much of her time bumping around the desert in a Land Rover.

After Jordan, she spent several years in a jungle camp in Gabon surrounded by elephants and humpback whales, which is where the Pelican Black books began. They took life as a way to record all the best bits of people she had met and places she had been, with a plot to make them much more exciting. L.D. Sharpe has always plausibly denied being a spy – but the books were written to show what that life might have been like.

She now lives with her family and two mad dogs in Lüderitz, Namibia.


MY STORY

 

The Recruit began as a writing exercise that got out of hand. Shortly after my daughter was born, in an attempt to stave off baby brain, my husband used to set me random writing prompts that I could tap out with one finger on an iPad while nursing. One prompt was to imagine that you are a spy and your father works in the Cabinet Office, and from there, Sarah was born. 

 

Because I put her in a job that I had done in a country where I had lived, at first, she, of course, had a lot of me in her. But I found it difficult to write her well while still associating her with myself. I felt too self-conscious. I had to separate her from me and make her entirely someone else to be able to write her convincingly and give her her own agency.
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