D. Manning Richards was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He holds a Master of City Planning degree and is an avid amateur historian. The greatest period of his professional career, before becoming a novelist, was as a real estate developer of office, residential, and hotel buildings in Washington, D.C. He has lived and worked in Sydney, Australia, three times for a total of nearly nine years and traveled around the world extensively. But it was his interests in cities, history, and the writing of short stories and poetry that drew him back to Sydney to attend the 2000 Summer Olympics and to begin researching the history of the city. In late 2003, he returned to Washington DC to write an epic family saga about convicts, Aborigines, and Chinese embroiled in the birth and development of Sydney. DESTINY IN SYDNEY begins in 1788 with the founding of a penal colony and ends in 1902 with federation of Australia and women's suffrage. GIFT OF SYDNEY continues the three-family saga through two world wars and the Great Depression until a multicultural, world-class city was assured in 1981. He and his wife Judith lived in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés quarter of Paris at 23 Rue Jacob for four and a half years while researching and writing PARIS IN RUINS: A novel of Passion and the French Resistance. They now live in Nice, France, where he is writing the second novel in Marguerite’s trilogy titled FRENCH RIVIERA INTERLUDE.