Annalena McAfee Books in Order

Annalena McAfee was born in London and studied at the University of Essex. Her route into fiction ran through newspapers, where she spent more than three decades reporting, editing, interviewing, and reading closely.

She worked as a theatre critic at the Evening Standard before becoming arts and literary editor at the Financial Times. Later, she founded the Guardian Review and edited it for six years. Those jobs gave her a close look at deadlines, newsroom rivalries, literary culture, and the odd mix of ambition and gossip that gathers around public life.

McAfee was also writing for younger readers long before she published fiction for adults. Her children's books include The Visitors Who Came to Stay, Kirsty Knows Best, The Girl Who Got to Number One, Dreamkidz, and Patrick's Perfect Pet. They range from picture books to lively stories for older children, often taking childhood worries seriously while leaving room for imagination, humor, and a little chaos.

She knows that a small problem can feel very large when you're young.

In The Visitors Who Came to Stay, a girl has to adjust when her father's new partner and her son become part of the household. Kirsty Knows Best follows a child who uses vivid daydreams to handle a difficult home life and a school bully. The Girl Who Got to Number One turns the dream of pop stardom inside out, as an ordinary schoolgirl finds that success gives other people far too much control over her life.

Her first novel for adults, The Spoiler, arrived in 2011. It is a dark comedy about London journalism in the late 1990s, built around the clash between Tamara Sim, a young gossip writer, and Honor Tait, an elderly war correspondent with a guarded past. McAfee uses the setting she knows well, but the book is less a memoir than a sharp story about power, privacy, competition, and the stories people use against one another.

Then she headed north.

Hame, published in 2017, follows Mhairi McPhail as she leaves a failing marriage in New York and takes her daughter to the remote Hebridean island of Fascaray. There she is meant to create a museum and write the life of the island's late poet, Grigor McWatt. The novel digs into language, local history, family ties, and the question of what makes a place feel like home.

In Nightshade, McAfee moves into the contemporary art world. Eve Laing is a successful flower painter planning an enormous new work about poisonous plants, while a night walk through London forces her to reckon with love, rivalry, betrayal, and the cost of putting art first. Across these adult novels, McAfee returns to people whose professional confidence hides messier private lives.

McAfee lives in Gloucestershire with her husband, the novelist Ian McEwan. Her career has moved between journalism, children's books, and adult fiction, but curiosity connects the whole lot: she is interested in the stories people tell, the roles they perform, and what slips out when the performance breaks down.