John S. Frisby was born in Waterford, Eire, and educated in The London Oratory and Goldsmiths College, London University. He qualified as a Physics teacher at Southampton University and taught for twenty years in Hampshire schools.

Aged 18 and working as a trainee insurance broker in Piccadilly, John took stock of his life and bought a one-way coach ticket to Athens, spending the next three months swimming and exploring in the Greek islands. At the starry midnight of his twentieth birthday he ducked under an amazingly low-flying Perseids meteor, thinking, 'I've got to know how all this works!'

Arriving in Marseille and promptly having his passport stolen, John apple-picked in Aix-en-Provence, harvested grapes in Bezier and Carcassonne and went to Paris for the winter with friends he had met on his travels. Leaving the Odeon Metro, holding the map upside down whilst searching for their extremely budget hotel, he found himself on Pont Saint-Michel, overwhelmed by the stupendous beauty and power of the illuminated Cathedrale Notre-Dame. He remained in Paris, working, studying and discovering the City of Light for a year and a half, before returning to England to complete his studies.

Thirty-odd years later, in a motorhome in Spain, still with that sense of life's wonder and reading about the French mathematical genius Blaise Pascal, John started writing Pascalene. At first the novel was intended to be about divine inspiration and two brilliant and passionate Parisian love triangles, a century apart, and it is. However, life took over, as it always does. The joy of passionate love is vulnerable to life's events, politics, poverty and war and, underlying it all, the insidious and eternal misogyny of the privileged. What can survive, perhaps, is innate love, nurtured love, and friendship.