Although her output has diminished since the early 1970s, Susan Hill remains a significant figure in the English literary scene. Her novels sell solidly and attract considerable critical attention; she has won several literary prizes. Conventionally structured and precisely crafted, her works characteristically explore states of isolation, loss, and detachment.

Susan Hill was born in 1942 to R. H. and Doris Hill in Scarborough, a seaside resort on the east coast of England, elegant rather than boisterous and long past its heyday. She loved its old-world, genteel atmosphere, which much resembles that of Royal Leamington Spa, where she lived during the 1970s. Several of her novels are set in similarly quiet, faded resorts. After attending grammar schools in Scarborough and in Coventry, she read English at King's College, London University, graduating with an honors degree in 1963. For the next five years she reviewed books for the Coventry Evening Telegraph...