Sarah Addison Allen

Sarah Addison Allen was raised in Asheville, North Carolina, and her fiction has stayed close to it. She took a literature degree at UNC Asheville and published a romance, Tried and True, as Katie Gallagher in 2003, before Garden Spells appeared under her own name in 2007, reached the national bestseller lists and won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance fiction award. Three more novels came in the four years after it, then late-stage breast cancer, found in early 2011 when she was thirty-nine, halted the run; Lost Lake in 2014 marked her return. Other Birds, published in 2022, is set on Mallow Island off the South Carolina coast, in a horseshoe of five apartments called the Dellawisp after the small turquoise birds in its courtyard. Zoey Hennessey arrives to claim her dead mother's flat, a neighbour dies that same night, and the living tenants share the building with three ghosts. Her work has appeared in more than thirty languages.