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  • Learned by Heart:  The heartbreaking story of two very different women - diarist Anne Lister, the inspiration for the series Gentleman Jack, and orphaned biracial heiress Eliza Raine - who meet at fourteen and upend each
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  • Haven: In this adventure story set around the year 600, three Irishmen vow to leave the world behind and set out in a small boat to found a
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  • The Pull of the Stars: Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love.
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  • Akin: A tale of love, loss and family, in which a retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own
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  • The Wonder: The Irish Midlands, 1859. An English nurse, Lib Wright, is summoned to a tiny village to observe what some are claiming as a medical anomaly or a miracle - a girl said to
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  • Frog Music: Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is
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  • Room (London: Picador; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada; New York: Little Brown, 2010), my Man-Booker-shortlisted seventh novel, is the story of a five-year-old called Jack, who lives in a single room with his Ma and has
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  • The Sealed Letter (New York: Harcourt, 2008; Melbourne: Scribe, 2009; London: Picador, 2011). Based on a scandal that gripped Britain in the 1860s, this domestic thriller – my sixth novel - explores a feminist spinster’s
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  • Landing (New York : Harcourt, 2007).  A contemporary love story about emigration, Landing – my fifth novel - is set in boomtown Ireland and smalltown Canada. In 2008 the Golden Crown Literary Society
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  • Life Mask (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2004), my fourth novel, is about a love triangle in 1790s London, among the elite who moved through the overlapping worlds of art, politics, sport and theatre.
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  •  Slammerkin (London: Virago, 2000, reissued 2012; New York: Harcourt, 2000; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2009).  Inspired by a murder that took place in the Welsh Borders in 1763, Slammerkin, my third novel (and first historically
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  • Hood (UK 1995, US 1996, reissued 2011). Penelope O’Grady and Cara Wall are risking disaster when, like teenagers in any intolerant time and place—here, a Dublin convent school in the late 1970s—they fall in
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  • Stir-fry (1994). My first novel, Stir-fry is a coming-of-age story about Maria, a seventeen-year-old girl from rural Ireland who goes to university in Dublin and accidentally moves in with a lesbian couple.
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  • Astray (2012). This sequence of fourteen fact-inspired fictions about life-changing journeys to, in and from North America, which I have been writing one by one over the past decade and a half, is my
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  • Three and a Half Deaths  (UK/Ireland ebook, 2011). An accident, a suicide, an act of criminal negligence and a near-death experience.  Published by Picador as a Short Reads ebook in December 2011, bringing together
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  • Touchy Subjects  (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2006). My eighth book of fiction, this collection of contemporary stories about taboos and embarrassment ranges from Ireland to Louisiana, Canada to Tuscany, and includes characters old,
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  • The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (New York: Harcourt; London: Virago, 2002), my fifth book of fiction and second story collection, is a sequence of short stories about peculiar incidents in the history
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  • Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins  (UK title, Kissing the Witch) (New York: Joanna Cotler Books, 1997), my third book of fiction and first story collection, is a sequence of thirteen re-imagined
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  • The Lotterys More Or Less: the second book about the four-parent family sees their winter holiday plans disrupted when an ice storm shuts down Toronto. The Lotterys Plus One: The first in a series
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  • Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature (New York: Knopf, 2010; Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2010; paperback LA: Cleis, 2011). A dozen years in the making, Inseparable is a witty and scholarly guide to
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