Frances Hardinge Books in Order

If you want her best-known gothic mystery: The Lie Tree
If you like eerie family stories: Cuckoo Song → A Skinful of Shadows
If you want strange secondary-world fantasy: Deeplight → Unraveller
If you want wit, politics, and adventure: Fly by Night → Twilight Robbery / Fly Trap
If you want the most gloriously weird standalone: A Face Like Glass

Frances Hardinge was born in Brighton in 1973, and she grew up in rural Kent in a large old house that seems almost designed to make a child imagine strange things in the corners. She has said she wanted to write from about the age of four, and by six she was already turning out dark little stories with poisonings, fake deaths, and cliff-edge villains. That mix of the ordinary and the uncanny still runs through her books.

Oxford helped shape the writer she became.

She read English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she helped start a writers' group. Later she worked as a technical author for a software company, writing in spare hours and sending out short stories. A short story competition gave her a push, but the bigger turning point came when her friend Rhiannon Lassiter quietly passed pages of Fly by Night to an editor.

Fly by Night arrived in 2005 and made a strong first impression. It won the Branford Boase Award, and readers still love its black-eyed orphan Mosca Mye, slippery wordplay, crooked politics, and homicidal goose. Its sequel, Twilight Robbery / Fly Trap, showed that Hardinge could return to a world without making it feel smaller.

She never settled into repeating herself. Cuckoo Song starts with a girl who wakes after an accident knowing something is badly wrong, and turns into an eerie story about family, identity, and grief. The Lie Tree, the novel that won the Costa Book of the Year, gives readers a Victorian murder mystery, a truth-telling plant fed by lies, and a heroine whose hunger for knowledge keeps driving the story forward.

Then there are books like A Skinful of Shadows and Deeplight, which show how far her imagination can stretch without losing its human center. One is set against the English Civil War and fills a girl with ghosts. The other drops readers into the island world of the Myriad, where dead sea gods, salvage diving, fear, and damaged friendship all tangle together.

A Face Like Glass is another good example. In Caverna, where expressions have to be learned and even cheese can alter the mind, Hardinge builds an extravagant setting without losing sight of the lonely child at the center of it. Readers who love her most often talk about that balance. The worlds are wild, but the feelings are clear.

Her books rarely look alike on the surface.

But certain things keep returning. Hardinge likes clever, stubborn young protagonists who are forced to think their way through systems built by adults. She likes places with rules, taboos, and hidden machinery, whether that means an underground city, a town split between day and night, or a society that teaches its people how to wear facial expressions. She is also very good at writing uneasy families, dangerous bargains, and the moment when a child realizes that the story adults told them is not the whole story.

In more recent years she has published Unraveller, about a boy who can undo curses, and the illustrated tales Island of Whispers and The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, both created with Emily Gravett. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, but the more useful thing to know is probably this: if you pick up a Frances Hardinge book, you should expect something odd, intelligent, and a little bit unsettling. She still lives in England, and she is still very much the writer in the black hat.