John Fowles wrote The French Lieutenant's Woman — and stopped in the middle of the novel to speak to the reader directly: he, the author, did not know how it would end either. The year was 1969, and postmodernism was just learning to walk.
He was born in Essex in 1926. Oxford, French literature. He taught in Greece, and there wrote The Magus: the island of Spetses became Phraxos, and a labyrinth of intrigue became a novel about a man moved about like a chess piece.
The Collector (1963): a young man abducts a girl and keeps her in a cellar, believing that he loves her. The Magus (1965 in its first version, 1977 in its second). The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969) — a Victorian novel with three endings.
He lived in Lyme Regis. He died in 2005. Every one of his novels is worth reading twice.