alice tanner

DR ALICE TANNER (1976 – )

Alice is a strong, brave and fiercely independent woman.

She was born and bred in Chichester, in West Sussex, a city twinned with Chartres in northern France and Ravenna in northern Italy. Her parents died in a car accident in 1994, shortly before her eighteenth birthday. Since then, she has made her way in the world on her own.

Throughout her childhood, Alice suffered from dreams and nightmares, one dream of being consumed by fire on a wooded mountain in particular. Her symptoms call to mind Labyrinthine vertigo or Ménières disease, where sufferers experience a sense of time-out-of-time – or falling through time.

She has a PhD in Middle English Literature and currently teaches at a local university in Sussex. At the beginning of Labyrinth, she has just broken up with her long-term boyfriend and so has accepted an invitation from an old university friend to work as a volunteer at an archaeological dig in the Sabarthès Mountains, southwest France.