Emma Healey Books in Order

Emma Healey grew up in London, including Battersea, in a home where reading was a steady part of life. Before she became a novelist, she was drawn to books as physical objects as much as stories. She studied book arts and crafts at the London College of Communication after a foundation course at Central Saint Martins.

Her first degree was in bookbinding. It taught her how books are put together, though not, as she has joked, necessarily how to write them.

After university, Healey worked in places that kept her close to books and art: libraries, bookshops, galleries, and universities. She had originally leaned toward the visual arts, but writing kept becoming more important. Working in a bookshop made a writing life feel less distant, surrounded as she was by readers, shelves, and the everyday business of finding the right book for someone.

In 2010, she moved to Norwich to study prose fiction on the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. The course gave her the chance to take her fiction seriously and to develop a novel she had already been working on. She later worked at the university while finishing it.

That novel was Elizabeth Is Missing, published in 2014. Its narrator, Maud, is living with dementia and becomes convinced that her friend Elizabeth has disappeared. Maud's search also brings back memories of her sister Sukey, who vanished decades earlier. The book puts mystery, grief, dark humor, and the daily confusion of memory loss in the same small, urgent space.

The idea grew from Healey's experience of dementia in her own family. Rather than treating Maud as a puzzle to solve, the novel stays close to her point of view, including the frustrations, flashes of wit, and determination that remain even as her memory changes. Elizabeth Is Missing became a bestseller, won the 2014 Costa First Novel Award, and was adapted for television with Glenda Jackson as Maud.

Memory is only one of the pressures Healey writes about. Her novels often focus on families trying to understand one another when fear, illness, secrecy, or an uneven relationship has made plain conversation difficult.

In Whistle in the Dark, a mother tries to reach her teenage daughter after the girl returns from a four-day disappearance without explaining what happened. The novel looks at mental health, parental worry, and how quickly a family can lose its footing. It is tense, but it also makes room for the messy routines and small irritations of family life.

Her third novel, Sweat, shifts to a darker contest between Cassie, a personal trainer, and Liam, the controlling former partner she thought she had escaped. Set around exercise, food, discipline, and the gym, it asks what happens when someone who has been controlled gets an opening to seize power back. It keeps Healey's interest in inner lives and strained relationships, but gives the story a sharper revenge-thriller edge.

Healey lives in Norwich with her husband, daughter, and cat. She also volunteers with a creative writing group for visually impaired writers, and gardening is one of the ways she steps away from the desk.