It is the year 1586.
Her latest novel, Flood, is set in the fenlands of East Anglia during the seventeenth century, where the local people fight desperately to save their land from greedy.
At the same time it explores life under a foreign occupying force, in lands still torn by conflict to this day.
Set in the first century, it recounts, from an unusual perspective, one of the most famous and yet ambiguous stories in human history.
Her fourth novel, The Testament of Mariam, marked something of a departure.
Her first three novels, The Anniversary, The Travellers, and A Running Tide, all with a contemporary setting but also historical resonance, were published by Random House, with translations into Dutch and German.
In 1995 she founded Dundee Book Events, a voluntary organisation promoting books and authors to the general public.
She served for nine years on the governing council of the Open University and for five years worked as a manager and editor in the technical author division of an international computer company, but gave up her full-time job to concentrate on her writing, while continuing part-time university teaching.
While bringing up their five children and studying for an MSc in Mathematics and a BA and Ph D in English Literature, she had a variety of jobs, including university lecturer, translator, freelance journalist and software designer.
She read Classics and Mathematics at Oxford, where she married a fellow undergraduate, the historian David Swinfen.
In the race to thwart the plot, who will triumph - the ruthless conspirators or the equally ruthless State?About the Author: Ann Swinfen spent her childhood partly in England and partly on the east coast of America.
The young physician Christoval Alvarez, a refugee from the horrors of the Portuguese Inquisition, is coerced into becoming a code-breaker and agent in Sir Francis Walsingham\'s Secret service.
England is awash with traitors, plotting to assassinate the Queen and bring about a foreign invasion.
It is the year 1586
