Elif Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist, whose work has been translated into fifty-eight languages. The author of twenty books, thirteen of which are novels, she is a bestselling author in many countries around the world. Shafak's novel 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. The Island of Missing Trees was a Sunday Times bestseller, and was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction. There are Rivers in the Sky, which won an Edward Stanford Award for Fiction, is her latest novel.

Shafak holds a PhD in political science, and is a Fellow and a Vice President of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded the medal of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and, in 2024, was awarded the British Academy President's Medal for 'her excellent body of work which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range'.

TOM CREWE was born in Middlesbrough in 1989. He has a PhD in nineteenth century British history from the University of Cambridge. Since 2015, he has been an editor at the London Review of Books, to which he contributes essays on politics, art, history and fiction.

The New Life is his first novel. Crewe says:
'This is the book I knew I wanted to write long before I actually wrote it. I hope it reveals to readers an unfamiliar Victorian England that will surprise and provoke, inhabited by a generation in the process of discovering the nature and limits of personal freedom, struggling to create a better world as the twentieth century comes into view.'