Explore our new BookBrowse Community Forum!

Miranda J. Carter Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

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

Miranda J. Carter
Photo: Roderick Field

Miranda J. Carter

Miranda J. Carter Biography

Miranda Carter was educated at St. Paul's Girls' School and Exeter College, Oxford. She worked as a publisher and journalist before beginning research on her biography of Anthony Blunt in 1994. She lives in London with her husband and two sons. Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001), her first book, won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Orwell Prize, and was shortlisted for many other prizes, including the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Biography Award. In the US it was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the seven best books of 2002. Her second book was George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography) in 2010.

Miranda is married with two sons and lives in London.

Miranda J. Carter's website

This bio was last updated on 03/18/2015. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Interview

Miranda Carter shares her inspiration for her book, The Strangler Vine, the first in a series, and how travel to India shaped her outlook and writing.

You have written two award winning works of history/biography. What prompted the shift to fiction?

In 2010, I'd written two big fat non-fiction tomes and it had taken me fifteen years (and I'd had two kids). I realized I wasn't ready to go back into a hole and spend six or seven years patiently putting together a book in which I had to fact check every single phrase — it can be fascinating but also very draining. I wanted a new challenge, to write something faster and breezier, that used my appetite for history and research as a background but let me play around with the foreground, to see whether I could create characters and a plot. I love crime novels and for about ten years I had secretly harboured a longing to write a thriller about a detective from the early Victorian era, a brilliantly clever man from a really poor background who could see the whole Victorian world from top to bottom, and I had a whole bunch of settings I wanted to put him in. This just seemed the right moment to start.

What is the story you tell in The Strangler Vine?

I initially thought it was a conspiracy thriller but without me quite realizing it, it turned into a sort of road movie/adventure story. It's about two ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Books by this Author

Books by Miranda J. Carter at BookBrowse
The Infidel Stain jacket The Strangler Vine jacket George, Nicholas and Wilhelm jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Miranda J. Carter 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

  • Peter Ackroyd

    Peter Ackroyd

    Novelist, biographer, and poet Peter Ackroyd was born in London on October 5, 1949.

    He graduated from Clare College, Cambridge, and studied at Yale University as a Mellon Fellow, where he completed Notes for a New Culture: ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Strangler Vine

    Try:
    The Lambs of London
    by Peter Ackroyd

  • Eleanor Catton

    Eleanor Catton

    Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestseller The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and a Governor General's Literary Award. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Award, was short-listed ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Strangler Vine

    Try:
    The Luminaries
    by Eleanor Catton

We recommend 9 similar authors

View all 9 Read-Alikes

Non-members can see 2 results. Become a member
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket: Graveyard Shift
    Graveyard Shift
    by M. L. Rio
    Following the success of her debut novel, If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio's latest book is the quasi-...
  • Book Jacket: The Sisters K
    The Sisters K
    by Maureen Sun
    The Kim sisters—Minah, Sarah, and Esther—have just learned their father is dying of ...
  • Book Jacket: Linguaphile
    Linguaphile
    by Julie Sedivy
    From an infant's first attempts to connect with the world around them to the final words shared with...
  • Book Jacket
    The Rest of You
    by Maame Blue
    At the start of Maame Blue's The Rest of You, Whitney Appiah, a Ghanaian Londoner, is ringing in her...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

I am what the librarians have made me with a little assistance from a professor of Greek and a few poets

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

F the M

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.