Amanda Jennings Books in Order

If you want the clearest first taste of her style: In Her Wake → The Cliff House
If you love moody Cornwall settings: The Cliff House → The Haven → The Judas Tree
If you prefer dark family and relationship drama: Sworn Secret → The Storm → The Judas Scar
If you want class tension and toxic glamour: Beautiful People

Amanda Jennings was born in London in 1973 and grew up in a Berkshire village on the River Thames. That early mix of beauty, routine and close family life still feels close to her fiction. Her books are full of homes, coastlines, friendships and marriages that look settled on the surface and quietly dangerous underneath.

She went to Cambridge intending to study architecture, then realised pretty quickly it was the wrong fit and switched to History of Art. It was an early change of direction, but an important one. Her fiction has a strong visual sense, especially when she writes about houses, weather, rooms and the way a place can shape the mood of everybody inside it.

After university she started a copywriting business with a friend and later worked as a researcher at the BBC. For a while she thought comedy writing might be her way in, and a shortlisted sitcom script in a BBC competition gave her a real boost. But once she looked closely at what she most wanted to do, novels won.

By the time she had her first child, balancing work and family had become harder, and the urge to write fiction had become impossible to ignore.

When she was pregnant with her second child, she stayed at home and wrote whenever she could, grabbing spare minutes around family life. That work became Sworn Secret, her 2012 debut, a tense novel about grief, blame and buried truths. It became a strong Kindle seller and found readers in the UK, the US and Italy.

Her second novel, The Judas Scar, digs into miscarriage, bullying and the long reach of childhood trauma. It was later optioned for screen adaptation, which makes sense when you read her work. Even on the page, her stories are easy to picture, but they do not rely on spectacle. The power usually comes from people trying to live normally while something dark keeps pressing in.

That pattern runs through the books that followed. In Her Wake opens a door under one woman's whole identity after a family tragedy. The Storm turns a polished marriage into a study of coercive control. The Haven takes an off-grid dream on Bodmin Moor and lets it curdle into something frightening. Readers often come for the suspense, but stay for the emotional mess underneath.

Family dynamics sit at the heart of almost everything she writes.

She has said she is fascinated by the secrets people keep, the reasons they keep them, and the fallout when those secrets finally surface. You can see that in The Cliff House, where longing and jealousy build under a bright Cornish summer, and in Beautiful People, where reinvention, class and old wounds collide at a glittering wedding. Again and again, Jennings returns to outsiders, damaged intimacies and the shaky line between safety and performance.

Cornwall matters in her work too. Several later novels, including In Her Wake, The Cliff House, The Haven and The Judas Tree, use the coast, the weather and the feeling of isolation as more than just backdrop. Jennings now lives just outside Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. She has three grown daughters and, by her own account, a varied menagerie, and when she is not writing she is often outdoors with dogs, horses, mountains or the sea on her mind.