Jess Kidd Books in Order

Jess Kidd was born in London and grew up in a big London-Irish family with roots in County Mayo. Storytelling seems to have been part of everyday life around her, along with folklore, black humor, and the kind of family talk that can turn a simple memory into a full performance. Childhood trips to Ireland stayed with her too, especially the west coast landscapes that later became such a strong pull in her fiction.

She wanted to write before she could properly write.

As a shy child, she often preferred to put stories on the page rather than tell them out loud. That habit stuck. Her route into publishing was not quick or tidy. She left university after becoming pregnant with her daughter, worked a range of jobs to support them, and kept studying where she could, eventually finishing her degree through the Open University. Along the way she worked in social care, including supporting people with acquired brain injuries, and also held community and church office jobs.

The real turning point came when she returned to study on a bursary, first for an MA and then for a PhD in creative writing at St Mary's University in London. There she began thinking seriously about genre, especially how crime fiction could sit beside ghosts, folklore, and magical realism without losing its grip. The novel that grew out of that research became Himself.

Published in 2016, Himself introduced many of the things readers now associate with Kidd. It has an Irish village full of gossip and buried harm, a mystery about a missing mother, and a hero trailed by talkative ghosts. Readers who love dark comedy, vivid side characters, and the uncanny turning up in ordinary places tend to fall for it quickly.

She kept widening the map. The Hoarder, published in the US as Mr. Flood's Last Resort, turns a crumbling house, a difficult old man, and a lonely caregiver into something that is part gothic mystery and part family drama. Things in Jars heads into Victorian London, with detective Bridie Devine hunting for a stolen child through a world of collectors, surgeons, and showmen. The Night Ship goes bigger again, pairing the real 1629 Batavia shipwreck with the story of a lonely boy on the same island centuries later.

She does not stay in one lane for long.

That range is part of the appeal. Then came Murder at Gulls Nest, which opened her Nora Breen mysteries and showed how neatly her voice fits a seaside whodunit. She has also written for younger readers with Everyday Magic, a witchy, funny middle-grade adventure. Whatever the setting, her books tend to mix suspense with tenderness, and the strange with the familiar.

Across her work, certain things keep returning. Kidd likes outsiders, hidden histories, complicated families, and places that seem just a little haunted. She is equally at home with Irish villages, eerie London streets, boarding houses, and stormy coastlines. Even when the plots turn grim, there is usually warmth, mischief, and a sense that the marvelous is only one step away.

Her short story Dirty Little Fishes won the Costa Short Story Award in 2016, and her books have also been shortlisted for major Irish and crime-writing prizes. She has taught creative writing, including work with adult learners, and more recently has been developing original TV projects alongside her fiction. She now lives in North Yorkshire.