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Alan Bradley Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Alan Bradley
Photo: Shirley Bradley

Alan Bradley

Alan Bradley Biography

Alan Bradley is the New York Times bestselling author of many short stories, children's stories, newspaper columns, and the memoir The Shoebox Bible. His first Flavia de Luce novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, received the Crime Writers' Association Debut Dagger Award, the Dilys Winn Award, the Arthur Ellis Award, the Agatha Award, the Macavity Award, and the Barry Award, and was nominated for the Anthony Award. His other Flavia de Luce novels are The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Speaking from Among the Bones, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, and Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd, as well as the ebook short story "The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse."



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Interview

Alan Bradley discusses his first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie - the first of six planned books set in England in the 1950s, starring 11-year-old sleuth Flavia de Luce.

With the publication of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, you've become a 70-year-old-first time novelist. Have you always had a passion for writing—or is it more of a recent development?

Well, the Roman author Seneca once said something like this: "Hang on to your youthful enthusiasms – you'll be able to use them better when you're older." So to put it briefly, I'm taking his advice.

I actually spent most of my life working on the technical side of television production, but would like to think that I've always been a writer. I started writing a novel at age five, and have written articles for various publications all my life. It wasn't until my early retirement, though, that I started writing books. I published my memoir, The Shoebox Bible, in 2004, and then started working on a mystery about a reporter in England. It was during the writing of this story that I stumbled across Flavia de Luce, the main character in Sweetness.


Flavia certainly is an interesting character. How did you come up with such a forceful, precocious and entertaining personality?

Flavia walked onto the page of another book I was writing, and simply hijacked the story. I was actually well ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Alan Bradley at BookBrowse
What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust jacket The Golden Tresses of the Dead jacket The Grave's a Fine and Private Place jacket The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Alan Bradley but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

We recommend 15 similar authors


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