Perry Black

About Perry

Perry Black is the fiction-writing name of Perry Wood.
Different lives. Different places. Different people. Quite a lot to write about...
Perry's first career was in music in London. He later moved to Exmoor, where he trained horses and farmed livestock, before living in the Hautes-Pyrenees in France. Along the way, he developed another career coaching senior executives in blue-chip companies and exploring the often complicated ways in which people think, communicate and behave. Perry has spent over twenty years delivering masterclasses and mentoring internationally. 

He has written eight published non-fiction books, including Secrets of the People Whisperer, published by Random House, as well as seven books drawn from his years working with horses and riders.

He has also appeared as a featured guest and contributor on television and in the media, including BBC Inside Out, Richard & Judy and Channel 4 News, and wrote a longstanding monthly column for Spirit & Destiny magazine. His work has also been featured widely in the British press, broadsheet, tabloids and magazines.

Music remains part of his life. His compositions and recordings are currently used internationally in television and film, including Midsomer Murders and Walking Tudor Britain, as well as productions shown on all the UK’s major channels, Netflix and Amazon TV, and films and television programmes around the world.

From Life to Fiction


Across those different lives, one thing has remained constant: an interest in people — and animals — and in what makes them behave the way they do.
Those years around horses, human behaviour, communication and relationships have inevitably found their way into his fiction.


Nietzsche's thought experiment of eternal recurrence asks us to imagine having to live the same life again and again, exactly as it was. Before We Were Us turns that idea in a different direction: What if you didn't have to live the same life again — but kept living different lives while making the same mistakes?

The novel explores what happens when two people meet and fall in love again and again across different lives, carrying emotional patterns, fears and choices from one incarnation into the next — without remembering what has gone before.


And the same fascination with identity, behaviour, relationships and the things people do without fully understanding why runs through The Donor.

In The Donor, a heart transplant changes Cait Farrow's life in ways she cannot explain. As she unknowingly falls in love with the donor's widow, Mia, she becomes drawn into the unfinished life of the man whose heart she now carries — and a search for his abducted daughter.


The two novels approach the same underlying questions from very different directions: Who are we, what shapes us, and how much of our past determines who we become? And perhaps that brings us back to the observation that started this story... As a friend once said about Perry's life:


"...you certainly have not lived a thousand days the same.”