Fen Bailey has a comfortable life - but it's stifling her. She has her husband and family and everything she needs, except a sense of who she is. When she discovers an unconventional art school deep within the Yorkshire Dales, she hopes it may be the key to freeing the artist she used to be and longs to revive. But as she seeks to live and create, disastrous news from home threatens all she has achieved. Torn between her old life and the new, can she fulfil her obligations and still be true to herself? Or will the price of freedom be too high?

S.L. Russell was born in 1951 and educated at Rochester Grammar School before studying History at Durham University. Over the years, she has embraced a variety of roles, from playing piano at a ballet school and working at Woolworth’s to teaching English in Indonesia and scrubbing hospital steps. For twelve years, she taught children with special educational needs—a role she found deeply rewarding—and also spent 17 years volunteering with the Samaritans, an experience she describes as humbling and transformative.

A lifelong writer at heart, she was collecting rejection slips by the age of twelve and never let go of her desire to tell stories. Spurred on by friends, she completed her first novel Leviathan with a Fish-hook just before her fiftieth birthday. The book became the first in a trilogy, and to her surprise, more novels followed. Her ninth book, The Wounds of Time (2022), is the third in a loosely connected series that began with The Healing Knife (2020) and The Thorn of Truth (2021).

Russell’s fiction reflects her Christian faith, though her stories are far from preachy or pious. Instead, they are grounded in realism, with characters shaped by doubts, flaws, and patchwork pasts—just like the rest of us.

She lives in Kent with her husband and their dog Rosie. When she’s not writing, she’s making music—singing, playing the flute, or serving as a church organist.

Discover more about her work at www.slrussell.org and her blog at suerussellsblog.blogspot.co.uk, where she warmly welcomes visitors and comments.