IT might have taken 82 years but the wait must surely have been worth it, because Ann Merivale, who lives at the  Audley  Ellerslie Retirement Village in Malvern, has suddenly found herself a “hot hit”.

To be factually correct it’s not author Ann, but the semi-autobiographical book she has written called Woman Through the Ages. Even so any entry into the Amazon Top Ten “Hot New Releases for Women in History” deserves plaudits all round.

Ann is an enthusiast of the late American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, who believed in reincarnation and that people have more than one life on Earth, and she explained: “This book is not only quite unlike my seven previous books, but also probably unlike any other book ever written.

“The reason for this is that my own story is intermingled with accounts of numerous women who were through history unjustly neglected purely on account of their gender, together with several others who are famous today.”

The Ann Merivale story began in a house just outside Leeds in 1940, but the family later moved south and she obtained a degree in joint French and Spanish at Bristol University in 1962.

Following a secretarial course, Ann worked in London in recruiting before joining a charity in Geneva. A family trip in December 1990 to Ghana and Sierra Leone inspired an article for the Hull-Freetown Twinning journal and when a therapist friend read it he suggested she write a book.

Her first book was published in 2006 and was gradually followed by a further six, all aimed at helping people in the ways in which she had been helped.

Of Woman Through the Ages, Ann said: “The book arose from what I now regard as the great gift of having been rejected at birth by my father, who, having himself been the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, expected me to follow this Merivale male tradition.

"He then did an extremely successful job of brainwashing me into believing that I was ‘no good at all, either at or for anything’. Even obtaining a good degree in French and Spanish failed to remove from my mind the conviction that I was stupid.

“If the word ‘gift’ sounds strange, let me explain. Firstly, some excellent therapy of various sorts helped to increase my self-confidence. Secondly, in 1991, I heard a lecture about the renowned Christian Edgar Cayce, who had come to believe in reincarnation.”

Cayce was known as ‘the sleeping prophet’ because he had, while in a trance, not only prophesied both the world wars, as well as the date of the first moon landing, but also cured innumerable people of problems that had defeated their doctors.

Ann added: “This lecture, plus much further reading, led me to discover that the Catholic Church of my upbringing had got it wrong about us each having only one life on Earth.

"After that, thanks to joining the Edgar Cayce Association, I myself obtained a past life reading from the clairvoyant Aron Abrahamsen, a one-time associate of Cayce’s.

"He not only told me about five previous lives that all rang very true for me, but also said that I had “come this time partly as a writer…” – a massive surprise for a previously ‘stupid child’!

“After embarking upon a book aimed at showing how some of my past had influenced the present, I was given the privilege of training in Deep Memory Process (otherwise known as Past Life Regression) therapy with the late Jungian psychotherapist, Dr. Roger Woolger.

"Practising this therapy is immensely rewarding, as it enables so many people to be permanently cured – just as I had been myself – from what had previously seemed to be intractable problems, either physical or emotional. And whether or not one believes that what one sees in a regression actually happened is irrelevant, since the sole aim of the therapy is healing for the present.”

Which is where Ann is now, among the Amazon Top Ten Hot New Releases.