A former university lecturer who quit her teaching job in Preston to become a novelist is celebrating after topping the US fiction bestseller list.
Diane Setterfield's debut novel The Thirteenth Tale stormed to number one, selling 70,000 copies in the process, six years after she quit her career as a lecturer in French at the University of Central Lancashire.
And there are reports the 42-year
-old's agent has secured her a £1.3m publishing deal in the UK and US.
Former colleagues at the university today congratulated Diane. A UCLan spokesman said: "Friends and colleagues from the Department of Languages and International Studies offer their warmest congratulations to Diane on her well-deserved success.
"Diane's love of books was already in evidence in the enthusiastic way she taught students of French literature at UCLan."
The Thirteenth Tale is described as a gothic mystery and tells the story of a bookseller's daughter who is commissioned to write the biography of a dying writer, who has hidden the truth of her own tragic past whilst spending a lifetime creating outlandish life histories for herself.
It is the first British debut novel to reach number one in America since The Horse Whisperer, by Nicholas Evans, in 1996.
The Thirteenth Tale received few press reviews and its success, particularly in the US, has partly been explained by the enthusiastic response of internet bloggers.
