—  Books  —

The House on Rye Lane was published by Borough Press / Harper Collins on 18th January 2024!

The House on Rye Lane is available in all good bookshops and online from 18th January (UK, ANZ) and in North America from 26th March. I’m excited to see it out in the world, and to hear what you think. If you enjoy it, please consider leaving a review on Amazon, Goodreads or Waterstones, and please tell your bookish friends!

2008. The house Maxine and Seb have just bought was a bargain – a huge Georgian townhouse on the edge of Peckham Rye, it needs a lot of work but Max couldn’t resist it. Now they are in, though, nothing seems to be going right – and as the problems mount up, Max starts to doubt her relationship as well as her decision. Is Seb all he seems to be? And why are the neighbours so evasive about the house’s previous owner?

1994. Cookie and his parents have been forced by his dad’s gambling debts to move into the attic room of a big old house, as lodgers. Tensions run high between them and their elderly landlady, and there’s something odd about the place that Cookie can’t quite put his finger on…

1843. Horatio built this house for his beloved wife, who then died in mysterious circumstances. After a second death on the premises, both his servants and the locals are starting to talk. Horatio’s grief is tinged with shame and guilt. What is he hiding? And will the house ever be free of his legacy?

THE HOUSE ON RYE LANE is a tense, taut, beautifully crafted novel about the treachery of secrets and the many ways the past can echo into the present, from the acclaimed author of THE SILENCE.

The Silence is out now!

THE SILENCE is out now in e-book, audio, hardback and paperback! It’s in all good bookshops in the UK including Waterstones and independents. In Australia and New Zealand the paperback was published in May 2021 and in North America it came out in July 2021 with Custom House, a Harper Collins imprint. The Silence was longlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger award in 2021, and has so far been translated into Italian, French, Polish and Arabic.

If you’d like to read the first five chapters of The Silence you can do so here!

It is 1997, and in a basement flat in Hackney, Isla Green is awakened by a call in the middle of the night: her father Joe, phoning from Sydney. It seems that 30 years ago, the Greens’ neighbour disappeared. Joe tells Isla he thought Mandy had moved away with her husband, but now Mandy’s family is trying to reconnect, and there is no trace of her. Isla’s father was allegedly the last person to see her alive, and now he’s under suspicion of murder. 

So Isla goes back to Australia for the first time in a decade, to support her father and to search for the truth. The return to Sydney brings up echoes from the past, taking back to the heat of summer 1967, to a quiet street by the sea where two young couples live side by side. The more questions Isla asks, the more she learns about the secrets each marriage bore. Could her father have done something terrible? How much does her mother know? And is there another secret in this community, one which goes deeper into Australia’s colonial past, which has held them in a conspiracy of silence?

If you would like a review copy of The House on Rye Lane, you can contact my publicist Maud Davies at Borough Press (UK only) at maud.davies@harpercollins.co.uk or you can contact my agent Nicola Barr at nicola@thebentagency.com