Louise Hare Books in Order

Louise Hare is a London-based novelist who writes historical fiction with a strong mystery pulse. She grew up in Warrington, later moved to London, and took an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books are interested in the people history tends to push to the side, and in how love, ambition, and danger shape ordinary lives.

She was a big reader long before she was a published writer.

As a child, she spent her pocket money on books and borrowed as many as she could from the library. She wrote stories when she was young, then drifted away from it for years. In her thirties, while working in the travel industry, she started thinking hard about what kind of life she wanted and what kinds of books she wished existed. Hare is mixed-race, half Nigerian and half British, and has spoken about growing up with white adoptive parents in Warrington. Questions of identity, belonging, and who gets to feel at home became central to her work.

Before publication, there was a false start. She spent a couple of years writing an earlier novel that never found a publisher, then signed up for the Birkbeck MA to see if she could get better and keep going. That course changed things. A short story she wrote in her first term, about a young Jamaican man just arrived in Britain on the Empire Windrush, got such a strong reaction from her classmates that she kept following the character.

That short story became This Lovely City.

The spark for the novel came after a visit to the deep-level shelter under Clapham Common, where Windrush arrivals were housed for a time after the war. Hare began imagining what that shock and dislocation must have felt like. In This Lovely City, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews tries to build a life in postwar south London while suspicion closes around the city's newest arrivals. The book was chosen for BBC Two's Between the Covers, shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and longlisted for the HWA Debut Crown. She was also named one of The Observer's ten best debut novelists of 2020.

She followed it with Miss Aldridge Regrets and These Foolish Things, the two books in her Canary Club Mystery series. Both novels center on Lena Aldridge, a mixed-race singer navigating 1930s glamour, sharp class divisions, and real personal risk. One book sends Lena onto the Queen Mary after a murder in Soho. The next takes her to Harlem, where family history, romance, showbusiness, and another death collide. These are stylish mysteries, but they are never just puzzles. Hare keeps returning to secrecy, performance, reinvention, and the cost of passing.

Music matters in Hare's fiction.

Jazz runs through her first three novels, and she has said she loves building character through the music people listen to. She played clarinet at school, and that affection for sound and rhythm shows up on the page. With The House of Fallen Sisters, she jumped back to Georgian London and showed she was not tied to one century or one kind of plot. Her short fiction has appeared in MIROnline and The Good Journal. She still lives in London, is a regular contributor to the Author Not Present podcast, and the city clearly keeps feeding her imagination.