Katherine Faulkner Books in Order

Katherine Faulkner grew up in London and studied history at Cambridge before completing postgraduate training in newspaper journalism. Her route into fiction began in busy newsrooms, but the questions that drive her novels were already there: what people keep hidden, how friendships shift, and how quickly an ordinary situation can turn uneasy.

She spent about a decade at national newspapers, working as an investigative reporter and editor. She later served as joint Head of News at The Times in London. Her undercover reporting received the Cudlipp Award for investigative journalism, experience that sharpened her eye for social pressure and the gaps between public stories and private lives.

Then pregnancy gave those concerns a fictional doorway.

At her first antenatal class, Faulkner was struck by the heat, awkward small talk, and sudden intimacy of being put in a room with strangers at a big turning point in life. She began wondering what might happen if one new acquaintance simply would not go away. That seed became Greenwich Park, her debut novel, which she wrote while on maternity leave with her first daughter.

The practical side of that first book was far from glamorous. Faulkner has described taking her laptop out in the bottom of a pram, then stopping to write once her baby had fallen asleep. She completed much of the work through a Faber Academy novel-writing course. Greenwich Park follows pregnant Helen, whose unsettling new friendship with Rachel brings old secrets closer to the surface. It sets the pattern for Faulkner’s tense domestic stories, where a comfortable London life can conceal fear, guilt, and complicated loyalties.

Her second novel, The Other Mothers, returns to the social world around new parenthood, this time through Tash, a mother and aspiring freelance journalist drawn into a polished, wealthy playgroup. When a young nanny is found dead, Tash’s search for a story collides with her desire to belong. The book mixes a murder investigation with questions about money, status, friendship, and the pressure to look as though life is under control.

In The Break-In, Faulkner puts Alice, a London mother hosting a playdate, at the center of a nightmare when an intruder enters her home. Alice survives, but being cleared for self-defense does not settle her growing doubts about the man she killed or the people around her. It is another story built from a familiar setting, then pushed into a situation where safety, trust, and reputation all start to fray.

Faulkner has said she is not a heavy planner at the beginning of a novel. She tends to start with a place, a few characters, and an atmosphere, then works toward the plot as the story takes shape. That approach suits books full of uneasy relationships, changing points of view, and clues that gain weight as readers learn more. Her journalism background also shows in protagonists who notice details, ask uncomfortable questions, and keep digging when others want them to stop.

She lives in London with her husband and children, and writes full time.