Marlene Stanton was born in London, England and came to Canada at the age of three. In Ottawa, where she grew up, she decided to study journalism at Carleton University. It meant leaving the Ottawa Ballet Company, where she had been a soloist. In Vancouver, she was associate editor and features writer for a performing and visual arts magazine called Performance. And in Charlottetown, she spent more than twenty years with CBC as a television news reporter, documentary writer/producer and assignment editor. She now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. <i>Mercy, Mercy</i> is her first book.