Jennifer Johnston is the author of six slim, critically acclaimed novels. She has won several awards: among other prizes, The Captains and the Kings (1972) won the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award for the Best First Book and The Old Jest (1979) was named the Whitbread Book of the Year for 1979; Shadows on Our Skin (1977) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Johnston is nominally Protestant, but chiefly Irish. She lives about a mile from the Londonderry border, next to the River Foyle, in a house like those around which she centers most of her novels--a Georgian Big House, once held by a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowner. The house is necessarily large: she has nine children, four from her first marriage and five stepchildren. Her second husband, David Gilliland, is a solicitor in Londonderry. She finds children an "enormous pleasure.... a sort of investment, rather like my books. They become more interesting as...