Melanie Golding Books in Order

Melanie Golding is an English novelist and musician from Leicestershire. She grew up there, later lived in Leeds and Sheffield, and moved to Gloucestershire in 2007. Her fiction often takes an old folk tale and asks what it would look like if it happened now, in a hospital ward, a seaside flat, or a struggling traveling carnival.

For a long time, writing meant songs rather than novels. Golding has said she was writing forever, but her first serious attempts at fiction began around 2005, when she was teaching music in a secondary school in Doncaster. Before publication, she also worked as a farm hand, a factory worker, a childminder, and a music teacher, jobs that gave her a close-up view of ordinary stress, work, money, and family life.

It was not a straight line.

Wanting a more structured way to improve, she enrolled on the MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and graduated with distinction. The book she began on the first day of that course became Little Darlings. After years of trying, rewriting, and rejection, that manuscript sold in 2017 and was published in 2019. She later stayed with Bath Spa for doctoral work and completed a PhD in Creative Writing in 2022, focusing on how folklore can be reshaped inside contemporary thrillers.

Little Darlings was the book that introduced many readers to her work. It follows a new mother who becomes convinced her twin sons have been taken and replaced, and it uses changeling lore to explore postnatal fear, disbelief, and the lonely feeling of not being trusted. The novel won the Dragon Award for Best Horror Novel, was optioned for film, and was translated into multiple languages. More importantly, it showed Golding's particular strength, making the supernatural feel possible because the emotional ground underneath it is so real.

She built on that with The Replacement, published in the US as The Hidden, a crime-tinged reworking of selkie folklore, and then The Sight, set around a family carnival and a young woman cursed with seeing how people will die. Readers who click with Golding usually like the same mix: eerie folklore, strong narrative drive, and characters whose lives are already under pressure before anything uncanny begins. Mothers, daughters, family secrets, and the question of who gets believed keep turning up in her books.

Grounded details are part of the spell.

These days Golding's career stretches in a few directions at once. Alongside writing novels, she works as a musician, mentors emerging fiction writers, teaches creative writing, and has worked as an associate lecturer at Bath Spa University. She also leads music and storytelling sessions for babies and toddlers and runs singing and choir work for adults, which makes sense for a writer so interested in rhythm, voice, and the way old stories travel from person to person.

She is still writing, still returning to folklore, and still finding new ways to bring it into contemporary life. If you start with Little Darlings, move on to The Hidden or The Replacement, or jump into The Sight, you'll see the pattern quickly: familiar fears, old myths, and everyday people trying to hold onto reality when it starts to shift.