Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan came to fame as the first woman to win the Newdigate Prize for best undergraduate poem at Oxford in 1927. Starting with Appius and Virginia in 1932, she published eight novels, her last being Trance by Appointment in 1939. Her novel Two Thousand Million Man-Power was reissued in the Recovered Books series from Boiler House Press in 2022. She was injured when a German bomb struck her flat in October 1940 and she died at her parents' home in Bath in March 1941.Kim Adrian is the author of two works of criticism, Dear Knausgaard and Sock, as well as the memoir, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet, a Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist. Stanislava Dikova is a Research Impact Manager at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her PhD in English Literature at the University of Essex in 2019.

An extremely original novel, a work of conscious art." Forrest Reid, The Guardian"Psychological insight and imagination ... a work of striking talent. Compels one to go on reading by the admiration one feels for the author's ingenuity and her uncanny insight into human beings." Leonora Eyles, Times Literary Supplement