Kerry Fisher Books in Order

If you want family secrets and moral knots: The Silent Wife → The Secret Child → The Woman I Was Before
If you like midlife relationship drama: Other People's Marriages → The Woman in My Home → Whose Side Are You On?
If you want sunshine and second chances: The Rome Apartment → Secrets at the Rome Apartment → Escape to the Rome Apartment
If you prefer something lighter and sharper: The School Gate Survival Guide → The Not So Perfect Mother

Kerry Fisher grew up in Peterborough and studied French and Italian at the University of Bath. Leaving home seems to have switched on a lasting love of travel, languages, and the awkward thrill of starting over somewhere unfamiliar.

Before novels took over, she had a string of jobs that sound like the opening pages of someone else's fiction. She worked as an English teacher in Spain and Corsica, a holiday rep and grape picker in Tuscany, a PA in an art school in Florence, and later a guidebook researcher, author, and travel journalist. Those years abroad gave her plenty of material, but they also seem to have sharpened her interest in people who are between versions of themselves.

Then she came back to England and worked as a journalist.

That mattered. After years of writing about real lives, she turned toward fiction and the private dramas families carry behind closed doors. Her novels keep one foot in ordinary life, school gates, marriages, kitchens, friendships, and the endless pressure of family duty, then ask what happens when an old secret or one bad decision starts pulling everything loose.

It took a while.

Her debut novel, The School Gate Survival Guide, arrived in 2014 and showed the mix that still runs through a lot of her work: sharp social observation, humor, class tension, and women trying to hold a family together without disappearing inside it. Early books such as The Island Escape and After the Lie kept building on that territory, but with more emotional suspense and more pressure on the stories people hide from the ones closest to them.

A lot of readers first meet Fisher through books like The Silent Wife, The Secret Child, The Woman I Was Before, or Other People's Marriages. These are not puzzle-box thrillers. They are family dramas with real bite. The hook is usually simple and painful: a marriage shifts, a secret surfaces, a parent makes an impossible choice, an old friendship comes back with consequences. She writes women who are tired, funny, cornered, hopeful, and sometimes all four in the same chapter.

She also stepped into nonfiction with Take My Hand, written with Pat Sowa. The book grew out of a brutal stretch in both women's lives, when their teenage sons were diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses within weeks of each other. That project sits a little apart from her novels, but it also fits neatly beside them. Even in fiction, Fisher is interested in how people keep going when there is no tidy handbook for what comes next.

Then came Rome.

In The Rome Apartment, Secrets at the Rome Apartment, and Escape to the Rome Apartment, she lets some sunlight in without losing the emotional weight. The Italian setting matters, not just as postcard scenery, but as a way of shaking characters out of habits that have made their lives smaller. Across her books, whether the backdrop is a Surrey kitchen or a Roman palazzo, the pattern is similar: women hit a point where carrying on as usual is no longer possible, and they have to work out who they are when nobody else gets to choose for them.

Her books have sold more than a million copies, she is a USA Today bestseller, and her work has been translated into twelve languages. Still, the appeal seems pretty down to earth. Readers come for recognizable lives, difficult loyalties, and the feeling that even a badly tangled situation might still contain a way forward.

She now lives in Surrey with her husband and a Lab/Schnauzer called Poppy. Her young adult children are older now, but family life still seems to feed the work, which may be one reason her novels feel so alert to the funny, messy, exhausting business of loving people who know exactly how to push your buttons.