Carol Anne Dobson is a qualified teacher and librarian, with a B.A. in English, French and Russian. She has lived in Devon, England, for most of her life and North Devon provides the background for much of her first novel "Storks in a Blue Sky." Alsace became a second home to her when her daughter lived there for eight years and it is this Germanic region of France which also features in "Storks in a Blue Sky."
In 2009 Storks in a Blue Sky won the David St John Thomas Fiction Award.
Her second novel, "Freedom," a robot science fiction story for teens and young adults, is set in a futuristic New Mexico
An historical romance played out between North Devon's wild coast and moors and the mountains and river-crossed plain of Alsace.The beautiful, red-haired Sarah Durrant is an uneducated servant who takes the place of her mistress when she suddenly dies at Lynmouth, as they are travelling to Ilfracombe across the remote wilderness of 18th century Exmoor. Her own origins are a mystery. She only knows she is illegitimate and possesses a gold locket which contains a miniature of a woman who resembles her. North Devon at first proves a sanctuary from the violence of her past, but then the French aristocrat, Jean Luc de Delacroix, arrives from the New World en route to Alsace, and her life becomes a tangle of love, deception and fear. Jean Luc de Delacroix is a soldier and a scientist. He is a devout Catholic and one of the central themes of the novel is that of discrimination against Catholicism in 18th century England.
“The black visors of the robots made them seem even more emotionless than the other robots……They stood very close to Logan, almost touching him, holding their weapons. For the first time in his life Logan realized that he was seen as a threat.” A robot civilization governs Earth. The only humans alive on the planet are a group of children and teenagers who are being raised in different robot families. Sixteen –year-old Logan tries to find out where they have come from and what is going to happen to them. Can they escape? Why are there no other humans? This science fiction fantasy is set in the robot city of Albuquerque, bounded by the Sandia Mountains and the Rio Grande River.
Revolution and oppression have caused Esther Cerfbeer and Armand de Delacroix to flee their homeland of Alsace: Isabella does not know her origins and is the ward of Raphael McAlpine, the owner of Crow House. Their lives coincide in 1794, against a background of witchcraft and treachery, in North Devon, where young women are disappearing and two men have been killed, their eyes pecked out.
Carol Anne Dobson's paintings
