Amy McCulloch Books in Order

For adult adventure thrillers: Breathless → Midnight / The Girl On The Ice → Runner 13
For tech-filled middle-grade adventure: Jinxed → Unleashed
For YA boarding-school mystery: One for Sorrow → Two for Joy
For modern fantasy and romance: The Potion Diaries
For epic YA fantasy: The Oathbreaker's Shadow → The Shadow's Curse

Amy McCulloch was raised in Ottawa, Canada. Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, she grew up with a love of stories, especially the big, immersive kind that can carry a reader somewhere unfamiliar.

Before her own novels reached shelves, McCulloch worked in publishing as a commissioning editor at HarperVoyager. She spent her days with science fiction, fantasy, and young adult books, while writing her own work alongside a demanding full-time job. It was a useful apprenticeship, but it also meant learning how to protect time for her own stories.

Her first novel, The Oathbreaker's Shadow, arrived in 2013. It introduced a fantasy world where promises are bound in knots, and breaking one brings harsh consequences. The book set a pattern for much of her early work: young people facing rules that seem fixed, then discovering how much courage and choice can change things.

Adventure has always been part of the job.

Under the name Amy Alward, McCulloch wrote The Potion Diaries, a teen fantasy that mixes alchemy, royal trouble, romance, and a very public race to find a cure. Her middle-grade novel Jinxed moves in a different direction, following inventive coder Lacey Chu and a robotic cat called Jinx in a world shaped by smart technology. Both books put resourceful girls at the center and give them problems that cannot be solved by waiting for an adult to step in.

She also co-wrote The Magpie Society: One for Sorrow with Zoe Sugg. Set at a British boarding school full of old traditions and hidden grudges, it follows two very different girls investigating a student's death. McCulloch wrote Audrey's chapters, while Sugg wrote Ivy's, with the pair plotting the mystery together.

A change in direction came after a difficult stretch in McCulloch's career, when she found fresh energy in hiking and mountaineering. In September 2019, she climbed Manaslu in Nepal, becoming the youngest Canadian woman to do so at the time. The experience gave her the setting for Breathless, her first adult thriller, in which a journalist joins a dangerous Himalayan expedition and realizes a killer may be among the climbers.

The mountain was not simply a backdrop. It gave her a setting where weather, isolation, exhaustion, and group tensions all matter.

McCulloch has continued that approach in adult thrillers including Midnight, set on a voyage to Antarctica, and Runner 13, set during a punishing ultramarathon across the Sahara. Readers who enjoy her work often come for the remote locations and fast-moving danger, then stay for protagonists who have to think clearly when plans fall apart.

She now lives in London with her two sons. When she is not writing, her real-life adventures have included climbing Aconcagua, visiting all seven continents, completing the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara, and skydiving. Those experiences keep finding their way into her fiction, usually as the point where an already risky situation gets much worse.