Before the novels there was the stage. Jessie Burton, born in London in August 1982, read at Oxford and then trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, working as an actress and, between jobs, as a personal assistant. She wrote The Miniaturist in the gaps, and in 2014 it did something extraordinary: over a million copies in its first year, Waterstones Book of the Year, a Christmas number one, and a two-part BBC adaptation starring Anya Taylor-Joy in 2017.
What followed proved it was no accident. The Muse, The Confession and The House of Fortune were all Sunday Times bestsellers, and the work has been translated into some forty languages. She has written for children too, including The Restless Girls and Medusa.
Her novels tend to set two timelines against each other and to circle the same preoccupations: women who make things, the cost of being looked at, and what becomes of a life nobody was allowed to speak about.
11 hours and 53 minutes
