Tessa de Loo was born in Bussum, a small town not far from Amsterdam.  She made her début with The Girls from the Sweet Factory.  Her prize-winning novels include Meander, Isabelle, The Smoke Sacrifice and The Miracle of the Dog; while A Pig in the Palace looks at Byron’s travels in Albania.

Arcadia Books also publishes her million-copy best-seller, The Twins.  This novel grew out of her maternal grandmother’s experiences during the war, when she hid ten Jews and two conscientious objectors in her house – in addition to her eight children.  All survived the war – and one of the conscientious objectors would become Tessa de Loo’s father.

Tessa de Loo now lives in a village in Portugal, where ‘life is as it was in Fifties Holland and sometimes even as it was in the Middle Ages’.