Louise Fein Books in Order

Louise Fein was born and brought up on the outskirts of London. As a child, she read whenever she could, rode her bike, and made up stories, including a phase when she liked to pretend she was a pony. Books gave her a route into bigger, more interesting worlds, and writing soon became part of that habit.

She kept writing as she grew up, filling notebooks with stories, diaries, and poetry. Still, she saw it as a private pastime rather than a job. After university, she travelled, trained as a lawyer, and went into finance, building a working life alongside a growing family.

The urge to write didn't go away.

On train journeys home from work, Fein scribbled beginnings of novels, poems, and story ideas. An evening creative-writing class at CityLit fed the ambition, but the real change came when she noticed a master's course at St Mary's University in London, designed around completing a first novel. By then she was running her own consultancy, and she decided to give the course, and the book, a serious try.

She thought she could do it in a year. It took longer, but that decision led to People Like Us, published in the United States as Daughter of the Reich, her 2020 debut.

The novel is set in 1930s Leipzig and follows a German teenage girl raised inside Nazi beliefs as she becomes close to a Jewish boy. Its roots are personal: Fein's father was a German Jew who escaped Leipzig for London in 1933. He rarely discussed his earlier life, and died when she was seventeen, leaving her with questions that research and fiction helped her approach.

That combination of close family stakes and public history runs through her work.

The Hidden Child moves to London after the First World War, where a mother's love for her daughter tests the ideas and marriage that have shaped her life. In The London Bookshop Affair, a young woman working in a Strand bookshop enters a Cold War world of secrets, while an earlier wartime agent's story lies underneath. Book of Forbidden Words links sixteenth-century Paris and 1950s New York through an encrypted manuscript, following women who face the risks of preserving dangerous ideas.

Fein's historical fiction often looks at a big social force from inside an ordinary or intimate life: propaganda, eugenics, espionage, censorship, and the pressure to stay silent. Her central characters are often women reaching a point where going along is no longer possible. The questions are serious, but the stories keep the focus on relationships, family loyalties, and the choices people make when their world narrows.

Her novels are standalone stories, so readers can start with the setting or period that interests them most. Together, they return to moments when fear becomes policy and private courage has a real cost.

She holds an MA in creative writing from St Mary's University, London, and writes full time around family life. Fein lives in Surrey with her family, two cats, and Bonnie, a small dog who keeps her company while she works and hears plenty of plot problems.