Felicity McLean Books in Order

Felicity McLean was born, raised, and schooled in Sydney. Before most readers met her as a novelist, she built a career as a journalist, publishing work in newspapers and magazines and learning how much a story can turn on voice, detail, and the question someone almost does not want to answer.

Ghostwriting was part of her apprenticeship.

She has collaborated on memoir and life-writing projects, shaping other people's experiences into clear, readable narratives. That kind of work calls for patience, structure, and close listening, and those skills carried over into her fiction, where so much depends on what characters hide, misread, or remember badly. One of the best-known results of that period is Body Lengths, the memoir she co-wrote with Olympic swimmer Leisel Jones. The book looks past medals and headlines to the pressure Jones lived under, including depression, body scrutiny, and the strain of elite sport. It went on to win the Australian Book Industry Awards People's Choice for small publisher Adult Book of the Year, and Apple Books named it Best Biography of 2015.

Then she turned that same ear for voice toward fiction.

McLean has said she wanted to write an Australian Gothic novel, something unsettling set not in castles or fog but under blistering blue skies. That idea became The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone, her 2019 debut, in which eleven-year-old Tikka Molloy looks back on the summer three sisters from her neighborhood vanished. The book mixes suburbia, dread, black humor, and the lingering feeling that the past never really leaves.

It found readers quickly. The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone was published in multiple countries, translated into several languages, picked for Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program in the United States, and noticed on bookseller and crime award lists. More importantly, it introduced the things McLean does especially well: young narrators, uneasy families, and ordinary places with something slightly wrong in the air.

When she talks about the work that shaped her, the choices are telling. She has pointed to Melina Marchetta's Looking for Alibrandi as a formative book from her school years, and has also mentioned Robert Dessaix's Night Letters, Radiohead's OK Computer, and Sofia Coppola. That combination helps explain her fiction's mix of mood, wit, and adolescent unease.

Her second novel, Red, arrived in 2022 and takes a different route to some similar concerns. It is a contemporary reworking of the Ned Kelly story, set on the New South Wales Central Coast and told by Ruby 'Red' McCoy, a teenage girl trying to outrun her family history while dealing with her father's dodgy schemes and a policeman who seems to hold a grudge across generations. The past does not sit still in a Felicity McLean book.

McLean is based in Sydney today. She has appeared at literary events in Australia and overseas, and she has spoken plainly about the practical side of writing too, including getting up early to work on The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone around a full-time job and family life. That no-fuss work ethic suits the books. They care about secrets and shadows, but they are just as interested in how people keep going once morning comes.