When Roxane Dhand was a girl, siting in the back of the family car she would tell her two sisters stories about a family of ladybirds living in a mushroom. As she grew up, the ladybirds became people, the mushroom became an old castle and the stories grew to fit them. Curiosity was her constant companion. Each new scrap of history she discovered seemed to contain a “what if?’ The ‘what ifs’ nagged at her until she had to know the whole story and she began to write them down. The voices of women whispered to her from the past. They’d been left out. Their stories needed telling and were too difficult to ignore. Travelling when and where she had the chance, she expanded her tales to include these new places and the people who had lived there, always looking for a kernel of truth to base her books upon.