Jan Lowe Shinebourne was born in Guyana, and educated at Berbice High School and the University of Guyana. She comes from the same area of Guyana as her near contemporaries, Cyril Dabydeen and Arnold Itwaru. After school she was a reporter in the city, Georgetown. She began writing in the mid 1960s and in 1974 she was a prize-winner in the National History and Arts Council Literary Competition. In 1970 she moved to London where she lived for almost 40 years, then moved to Sussex where she lives currently. She did postgraduate literary studies at the University of London. In addition to her work as an author, she has also worked in London as an editor for several journals, as a political and cultural activist and as a college and university lecturer. She has done reading tours in North America, Europe, the Caribbean and Asia, and was a Visiting Fellow at New York University. She has published three novels including Timepiece (Peepal Tree Press, 1986) and The Last English Plantation (Peepal Tree Press, 1988) and most recently Chinese Women, a novel, (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) She has also written a collection of short stories, The Godmother and Other Stories.

In a moving novel that charts the fortunes of three generations of a Chinese family in the Caribbean, Jan Shinebourne explores the power of family myth, the seductiveness of invented traditions, and the way unconscious motivations seeded in painful childhood experience can resurface in adult life. For Joan Wong, growing up in a Chinese family in the political turmoil of 1960s Guyana, family history is never straightforward. There are the examples of her grandmothers - Clarice Chung, ironwilled matriarch who has ensured the family's survival through unremitting toil, with her pride in maintaining racial and cultural identity, and Susan Leo, whose failures have shamed the family, who found comfort from harsh poverty in relationships with two Indian men and adopting an Indian lifestyle. Later, when Joan Wong makes her own pilgrimage to ancestral China at the turn of the twentyfirst century, there are surprises in store.