Annie Groves has always lived in the North-West of England. She is the author of Ellie Pride, Connie's Courage and Hettie of Hope Street, a series of novels for which she drew on her own family's history, picked up from listening to her grandmother's stories as a child. Her most recent novels, including Goodnight Sweetheart, Some Sunny Day, The Grafton Girls, As Time Goes By and Across the Mersey, are based on wartime recollections from members of her family who come from the citiy of Liverpool. Annie Groves also writes under the name Penny Jordan, an internationally bestselling author of over 170 novels with sales of over 84 million copies.