Shelley Wood is a writer and journalist whose fiction and nonfiction have been published internationally. Her debut novel, The Quintland Sisters, was an instant number one Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestseller. Her second novel, The Leap Year Gene, will be published by HarperCollins Canada and Union Square Press (US), in August 2024.
Born and raised in Vancouver, Shelley has a home with her husband and dog in Kelowna, BC, and a job as the editorial director for the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, in New York, NY.
“The Leap Year Gene is an astonishingly beautiful, wonderfully unique, completely seductive novel about of a woman who ages one year for every four. It is also a sweeping and memorable portrait of the 20th century: eugenics, genetics, World Wars, feminism, politics, world travel and much more. Most of all, it is a novel about love and devotion — among families, friends and lovers — against the backdrop of a persistent violence against people who are judged to be born different. I could not put this novel down.”
Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes