Valerie Helene Mendes (née Barnett, born October 1939) is an English novelist and poet. Mendes is best known for her teenage fiction novels, Girl in the Attic, Coming of Age, Lost and Found and The Drowning, and for her historical novels for adults: Larkswood, Daddy’s Girl and Beatrice and Alexander. In 2021, Mendes published Not Only But Also: A Memoir under her own imprint VMBooks, and in 2022, The Gathering: Collected Poems.