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Rachel Heath was born in Bristol in 1968. She worked as an editor in publishing, and then as a literary consultant for television and as a reader before writing her first book. Her first novel,The Finest Type of English Womanhood, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2009 and for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award 2010. She is also a contributor to the short story anthology, The Best Little Book Club in Town. She has three children, and lives in Bath.
Born and brought up in the Essex market town where she still lives, Stella is content with the everyday satisfactions that marriage and motherhood bring. Only when her own mother goes missing does Stella's sense of herself, and the world she inhabits, shift ... like her central character's life, Rachel Heath's novel has its own quiet pleasures. Sunday Times Heath's skill is to wind people together, some of them related to one another, others strangers with nothing in common except the place in which they live ... This is a novel about personality, and behaviour - oh, and Saffron Walden. Much is convincing (Saffron Walden entirely so: I feel I know it). The Finest Type of English Womanhood was shortlisted for the Costa first novel award. The second is notoriously hard to pull off, particularly when the first has attracted attention. Part of the Spell goes a good way towards meeting that challenge. Guardian
