A Fatal Inversion

In the long hot summer of 1976, a group of young people are camping in Wyvis Hall. Adam, Rufus, Shiva, Vivien and Zosie hardly ask why they are there, what they are doing or how they are to live; they scavenge, steal and sell the family heirlooms. In short, they exist. Ten years later, the bodies of a woman and a child are discovered in the Hall’s animal cemetery. Which woman? Whose child?

Author Biography Barbara Vine is the pen-name of Ruth Rendell. She has written fourteen novels using this pseudonym, including A Fatal Inversion and King Solomon’s Carpet which both won the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award. All her books are available in Penguin. Ruth Rendell sits in the House of Lords as a Labour peer. She lives in Maida Vale, London.

Author Biography

Barbara Vine was the pen-name of Ruth Rendell, and Viking published all of her books under that name.

Rendell was an exceptional crime writer, with worldwide sales of approximately 20 million copies, and regular Sunday Times bestsellers.

Rendell won numerous awards, including the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for 1976’s best crime novel with A Demon in My View, a Gold Dagger award for Live Flesh in 1986, and the Sunday Times Literary Award in 1990. In 2013 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for sustained excellence in crime writing. In 1996 she was awarded the CBE and in 1997 became a Life Peer.

Ruth Rendell died in May 2015.