Born in Worcestershire in 1968, Jasper Kent read Natural Sciences at Cambridge before embarking on a career as a software consultant. He also pursues alternative vocations as a composer and musician and now novelist.The inspiration for Jasper's bestselling début, Twelve (and indeed the subsequent novels in The Danilov Quintet) came out of a love of nineteenth-century Russian literature and darkly fantastical, groundbreaking novels such as Frankenstein and Dracula. His researches have taken him across Europe and to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and the Crimea, including three days on a train from Cologne to the Russian capital, following in the footsteps of Napoleon himself.Jasper lives in Brighton, where he shares a flat with his girlfriend and several affectionate examples of the species rattus norvegicus.