Danielle Steel

Danielle Steel was born in New York City in 1947 to a German father and a Portuguese mother. She spent much of her childhood in France, studied at Parsons and New York University, and worked in public relations and advertising in New York before she began to write.

Her first novel, Going Home, appeared in 1973. From the early 1980s her books reached the bestseller lists almost every year, and she has published more than 180 novels, often several a year. With reported sales of over 800 million copies, she is one of the best-selling authors of all time.

Changes (1983) follows Melanie Adams, a New York television news anchor who marries a Los Angeles heart surgeon after a short courtship and must decide what she will give up to join his life and family. Like much of her work, it centers on a woman who rebuilds her life through love, loss and family crisis. Critics often dismiss her books as formula, but readers have kept them selling for five decades. She lives in San Francisco and Paris.