Peter Reynolds grew up in Nuneaton, a Midlands town not unlike the fictional Redwick that appears throughout his writing, in an era when department stores still formed the heart of British town life. As a youngster, he spent countless Saturdays wandering polished shop floors with his parents, fascinated not only by what customers could see, but by the hidden machinery behind it all — the stockrooms, service corridors, routines, characters and quiet dramas unfolding out of sight. Those early impressions stayed with him for decades and eventually became the foundations of his debut novel, The Heroes of Harrand & Blythe — a warm, nostalgic and quietly mysterious story about hidden doors, unseen lives, and the small acts of kindness that can alter the course of ordinary people forever.

Peter came to writing later in life after a long and varied career that took him across Britain and Europe working in technology, banking and large-scale organisational change. He has worked on transformation programmes for major organisations including NatWest, HSBC, HP, Vodafone, Boots and the UK Government, often specialising in helping struggling teams rediscover purpose, confidence and direction. Over the years he has travelled extensively, coached hundreds of people, built improvement teams from scratch, and spent much of his working life listening carefully to how people behave, speak, worry, joke and cope under pressure. Those experiences now feed directly into his fiction, giving his characters the texture and familiarity of real people rather than invented ones.

Away from work, Peter’s life has been equally rich in experiences that quietly find their way into his storytelling. He spent four years as Chairman of a non-league football club, helping guide their women’s team from amateur status into the professional game. He served for six years as a magistrate, learning the difficult balance between empathy, evidence and human judgement. He has completed annual charity challenges for more than a decade, including the Great North Run, and during lockdown cycled indoors every day for a year raising money for charity. He has also held a private pilot’s licence, produced electronic music for many years, and remains an enthusiastic gardener — pursuits that perhaps explain why his writing often combines structure and imagination, observation and emotion, humour and humanity in equal measure.

His second published work, Cluckageddon, takes a dramatically different turn. What begins as an apparently ridiculous premise — chickens rising up against the British establishment — gradually unfolds into a sharply observed satire of modern politics, bureaucracy, media outrage and national division. Beneath the absurdity lies a recognisable Britain of committee meetings, confused authority figures, public overreaction and people simply trying to carry on regardless while the world around them becomes steadily more ridiculous. Readers often find themselves laughing one moment before realising, slightly uncomfortably, that parts of it no longer feel entirely impossible.

This was followed by Unable to Assist, a comic but surprisingly thoughtful story exploring what might happen if the internet and artificial intelligence collectively decided they had finally had enough of humanity and simply stopped cooperating overnight. Between Cluckageddon’s increasingly chaotic uprising against the British government and the technological collapse of Unable to Assist, Peter’s wife has occasionally joked that he may secretly be “a bit of an anarchist underneath it all” — an accusation he firmly denies, usually while writing another story about civilisation quietly unravelling in a deeply British manner.

Across all his work runs the same underlying fascination: ordinary British lives, hidden connections, quiet heroism, nostalgia, humour, and the idea that remarkable things are often happening just beneath the surface of everyday life.

Peter lives in Lancashire with his wife and their two dogs, where he continues to write, play keyboards, garden, and work on several new books planned for release over the coming years.

Readers can stay up to date and connect with Peter via the blog on this site or the Facebook group Harrand and Blythe.