Wendy Percival was born in the West Midlands and grew up in rural Worcester. After training as a primary school teacher she moved to Devon to take up her first teaching post and remained in teaching for 20 years.

An impulse buy of Writing Magazine

prompted her to start writing seriously. She won the magazine's 2002 Summer Ghost Competition and had a short story published before focusing on full length fiction.

​The time-honoured "box of old documents in the attic" stirred her interest in genealogy, the inspiration for her Esme Quentin novels.

She writes about the secrets she unearths during her own family history research on her blog.