When the Cows Come Home

Peter Longley was brought up in southeast England and educated at Tonbridge School in the 1950s before reading theology at Cambridge. In 1965, he spent the summer as a kibbutznik in Israel. From 1967-1977, he was the estate manager of Tullamaine Castle in Ireland, which was then American-owned, and it took him to Georgia, USA, where in 1978 he went to sea as a ship's artist. Later, he became a cruise director with Royal Viking Line, and in 1989, he joined Cunard as the cruise director of Queen Elizabeth 2, where he met his Bavarian-born German wife. Cruise ships took him all over the world in the 1980s and 1990s until he retired and became the horticultural interpreter of the Springfeld Botanical Garden in Missouri, USA. He started writing novels in 1978, and he returned to England in 2017.