Sherry Thomas

Qingdao highlighted in red, with Shandong province in orange

Thomas was born in 1975 in Qingdao, Shandong, China.[5] Thomas recalls that her grandmother did the crossword puzzles in China's official English-language newspaper.[6] In 1984, Thomas's mother went to the United States to study, financed by Thomas's paternal great aunt.[6] Thomas remained in China until her grandmother died in 1988, and she emigrated to the United States at the age of thirteen.[6] Her mother was in graduate school at Louisiana State University.[2]

Thomas improved her English by reading science fiction and romance novels, including those by Rosemary Rogers.[2] Thomas reportedly read Rogers' novel Sweet Savage Love using a Chinese-English dictionary.[7] Thomas found English-language romance books interesting due to their departure from Chinese cultural understandings of courtship. "I was quite surprised later to discover that the hero and the heroine in a romance weren’t required to hate each other for 600 pages running."[6]

She received her BS in economics from Louisiana State University and earned her master's degree in accounting at University of Texas at Austin.[8]

She lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and sons.[9][10]

Thomas once discussed the challenges of writing in an historical setting other than Regency England:

If I just said the Northwest Frontier of British India or Chinese Turkestan, most people would be drawing a blank. What kind of terrain are we dealing with? What kind of climate? What kind of people would the [hero and heroine] come across? So yes, more work is necessary to world-build, but only so that my readers would be able to visualize and understand the setting.[34]

As far as her writing habits, she revealed that she is not the type who writes every day, and enjoys taking days off when she can. For The Hidden Blade she was on a tight deadline and only slept for two hours a day, several days in a row, so afterward in an interview she said, "not writing for at least a week or so seems like heaven!"[4]

On the appeal of romance, she said it might be attributable to not just the "emotionally fulfilling reading experience" but also the escape to a different time and place. With historical romances particularly, she said, "I will also posit that since marriage was so final and divorce so difficult — and women's lives so much more restricted — the stakes around a romance were higher in Ye Olde Times."[4]

While Rogers's novels acted as her gateway to the romance genre, it was reading Laura Kinsale and Judith Ivory that convinced her to set her historical romances in England:

I fell in love with the turn-of-the-century setting ... I adore that it was a time of tremendous advances in scientific understanding and technological capability—in Private Arrangements, for example, there is an automobile—and yet people still lived under a formality that is exotic and almost incomprehensible to us here in 21st-century America. That formality sets off a wonderful tension for a writer to explore the sexual charge in a look, a word, a hand held a fraction too long.[6]

When it comes to world building for historical romances, she points to several elements that can assist the writer with effectively setting the reader in another time: showing practices and habits we frown upon today; practices we find acceptable today that they frowned upon; showing the similarities; using the correct forms of address; and, showing the cost of living. But she cautions that above all, the story must work or the reader will not care about the details. She studies how authors like Laura Kinsale, Courtney Milan, Judith Ivory, Ariana Franklin, and Laurie R. King integrate historical world-building into their narratives.[35]

Thomas has described herself as being drawn to reading and writing about characters who have more going on beneath the surface than is first apparent—what she calls the "I-didn't-know-that-about-you moment".[36]

Thomas's writing is often described as lyrical, lush, musical, graceful, rich, evocative, with unique metaphors and turns of phrase. Author Kiersten Hallie Krum asserted that Thomas, along with Joanna Bourne and Meredith Duran, make up the forefront of a new wave in historical romance fiction strong in lyrical prose.

Her elegant turn of phrase lifts the storytelling to new heights. Her novels are a lexicon of delight. Her unique word choice is that one step to the left that eschews the boring in favor of the unexpected; "unsighted" rather than the mere "blind" or "a high castle wall of a smile," wholly original and yet instantly recognizable. The cadence of her sentences seduce a reader as surely as any romantic hero until you want to lay down on the nearest flat surface and simply succumb as her prose takes you, Calagon-like, away.[3][18][20][38][39]

She also writes heroines who are deeply flawed as well as being unconventional, and will also break some of romance's rules. For instance, in Private Arrangements the hero and hero are estranged and take on other lovers.[38]

Criticisms of her novels typically center on weak or contrived plot points, not on her prose.[20][39][40]

One common theme that runs through many of her novels is of a couple whose love has been betrayed somehow in the past, and the novel starts years after that estrangement or betrayal. The events of the novel force them to recognize past faults and rekindle their love.[16] Unrequited love has been a factor Tempting the Bride, Beguiling the Beauty, Not Quite a Husband, and Ravishing the Heiress.[41][42]

Luckiest Lady in London contains strong themes of how women in Victorian England are under immense pressure to meet high ideals that can have disastrous consequences.[43] Some have noted that Thomas can craft a beautiful story using common themes, and in this book it was a poor girl marrying a wealthy man: "Thomas then adds great dialogue and human frailty, and creates entrancing stories that are completely addictive."[44]

In The Elemental Trilogy, the books explore the concept of identity, fate, and free will.[45]

• 0.5 Claiming the Duchess. Self-published. April 2014. ISBN 9781631280054.
• 1 Beguiling the Beauty. Berkley Sensation. May 2012. ISBN 9780425246962.
• 2 Ravishing the Heiress. Berkley. July 2012. ISBN 9780425250877.
• 2.5 A Dance in Moonlight. NLA Digital, LLC. March 2013. ISBN 9781620510759.
• 3 Tempting the Bride. Berkley. October 2012. ISBN 9780425251027.
• 3.5 The Bride of Larkspear. NLA Digital, LLC. November 2012. ISBN 9781620510551.

• 1. The Hidden Blade. Self-published. July 2014. ISBN 9781631280085.
• 2. My Beautiful Enemy. Berkley. August 2014. ISBN 9780425268896.

• 1. The Luckiest Lady in London. Berkley. November 2013. ISBN 9780425268889.
• 2. Private Arrangements. Bantam. March 2008. ISBN 9780440244318.
• 3. His at Night. Bantam. May 2010. ISBN 9780553592443.

• Delicious. Bantam. August 2008. ISBN 9780440244325.
• Not Quite a Husband. Bantam. May 2009. ISBN 9780553592436.

• 1. A Study in Scarlet Women. Berkley. October 2016. ISBN 9780425281406.
• 2. A Conspiracy in Belgravia. Berkley. September 2017. ISBN 9780425281413.
• 3. The Hollow of Fear. Berkley. October 2018. ISBN 9780425281420.
• 4. The Art of Theft. Berkley. October 2019. ISBN 9780451492470.
• 5. Murder on Cold Street. Berkley. October 2020. ISBN 9780451492494.

• The One in My Heart. Self-published. April 2015. ISBN 9781631280139.

• 1. The Burning Sky. Balzar + Bray. September 2013. ISBN 9780062207296.
• 2. The Perilous Sea. Balzar + Bray. September 2014. ISBN 9780062329387.
• 3. The Immortal Heights. Balzar + Bray. October 2015. ISBN 9780062207357.