Geras, Adèle

(British, 1944– )

Geras was born in Jerusalem and has lived in Manchester for over thirty years. She has written more than sixty books for children of all ages. Of her teenage fiction, start with Voyage (1983), set on a ship bearing emigrants (many of them Jewish) from Eastern Europe to America in 1904. The book explores the growing friendship and love between four young people, set against the harsh conditions of life at sea. The Tower Room (1990, first book in the Egerton Hall trilogy) is a romantic story set in a girls' boarding-school in the late 1950s, which captures the mood of dreamy adolescence between girlhood and maturity. Narrator Megan falls in love with Simon, the new lab assistant—and then discovers that her own foster mother is her rival. Troy (2000) tells, with realism and humour, the story of two sisters inside the besieged city, who become the playthings of Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Geras moved into adult fiction with Facing the Light (2003), a rich family saga centring on a seventy-fifth birthday party at which the past intrudes shockingly on the present.

Berlie Doherty, Lynne Reid Banks.

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