She is now a freelance journalist, as well as a writer of biographies and historical novels.

Her first book of fiction, Fitzempress's Law, was chosen by Frank Delaney of BBC Radio 4's Bookshelf as the best example of a historical novel of its year. She began writing fiction shortly after her second daughter was born. She married the film critic Barry Norman in 1957, and they settled in Hertfordshire with their two daughters. Now get down to Southampton.' Diana Norman became, at twenty years of age, the youngest reporter on what used to be Fleet Street. When she protested about this to the news editor, she was told: 'Many happy returns. Headhunted at 20 by the Daily Herald, Norman became the youngest reporter on Fleet Street, covering royal visits, donning camouflage to go on exercise with the Royal Marines, and missing her 21st birthday party because she was covering a murder on the south coast. At the age of 15, she left school, but with journalism in her background (her father had been a Times correspondent)and her hardy intelligence, the lack of formal education proved no barrier and by 17 she was n London, working on a local newspaper in the East End. See this thread for more information.īritish journalist Diana Norman also writes as Ariana Franklin.īorn Mary Diana Narracott, she grew up first in London and then in Devon, where her mother took her to escape the blitz. One woman, a young aristocrat recently saved by the death of her husband from a brutal marriage, is searching for the imprisoned son of a colonial friend: the other, a self-made woman, is looking for her daughter and companions, rescued from their destroyed ship but somehow lost on arrival in Britain.Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. But where the French captured by the British navy are recognized prisoners of war, the Americans are the non-combatants of their era. Britain is at war with the French and the rebellious American colonies. Two women, both searching for apparently missing people, meet in the chaos of wartime Plymouth. Even though it is set in the eighteenth century, this novel like her previous one has rare contemporary echoes.

Diana Norman's second book for us, published at the same time as the paperback of A Catch of Consequence, is another brilliant, stylish historical novel.

A remarkable, sparkling historical novel by the author of A Catch of Consequence.

Taking Liberties by Diana Norman