Carly Nugent Books in Order

If you want her best-known middle grade novel: The Peacock Detectives
If you want a darker YA story: Sugar
If you prefer adult psychological fiction: Soft Belly Days → Dream Girl
If you want the quickest sense of her range: The Peacock Detectives → Sugar

Carly Nugent grew up in Bright, in north-east Victoria, and she still lives there. That sense of place matters in her work. Even when her stories shift between age groups and moods, they stay close to family life, memory, secrets, and the way an ordinary day can suddenly feel strange.

She has been writing since primary school.

Nugent has said there was no single lightning-bolt moment that made her a writer. She kept writing because it helped her understand things. She also read constantly as a kid, and that stuck. The books she has talked about loving range from children's classics to more adult fiction, which makes sense when you look at how comfortably she moves between stories for younger and older readers.

A big turning point came while she was living overseas. Distance made her think hard about home, especially Bright and the details of growing up there. That homesick, observant feeling fed into The Peacock Detectives. At the time, she was teaching children around Cassie's age and also teaching creative writing, so the book's interest in clues, voice, and the act of storytelling grew out of real life as much as invention.

She followed Cassie's voice for years.

The Peacock Detectives took about five years to write and began as something smaller before growing into a full novel. The result is a warm, funny middle grade mystery about Cassie Andersen, missing peacocks, and a family that does not explain itself clearly. Readers tend to like the sharp child narrator, the Australian small-town setting, and the way the book handles big subjects without talking down to its audience. It went on to win the Readings Children's Book Prize, become a CBCA Honour Book, and make several shortlists.

With Sugar, Nugent moved into YA and a much tougher emotional space. Its sixteen-year-old lead, Persephone, is dealing with grief, guilt, and diabetes, and the novel was inspired by Nugent's own experience of living with diabetes. That personal link gives the book a very grounded feel. Readers who connect with Sugar often respond to how direct it is about illness, anger, shame, and the exhausting work of trying to make sense of random tragedy.

Before those books for younger readers, Nugent had already published the adult novels Soft Belly Days and Dream Girl. Soft Belly Days, adapted from an award-winning screenplay, leans into memory, buried guilt, and the return of childhood fears. Dream Girl follows Alyson, Zoe, and David across a single day that starts with dreams and turns darker by the hour. Her short fiction has also appeared in publications including Bellevue Literary Review and Award Winning Australian Writing.

What ties the work together is her interest in people who are trying to solve something, even when the real mystery is much closer to home. She writes children, teenagers, and adults, but the questions keep echoing: What happened? What are people hiding? How do you live with grief, illness, shame, or the things you cannot quite explain? Working from Bright in Victoria, Nugent has built a small but varied body of work that keeps circling those questions in fresh ways.