PJ Skinner Books in Order

If you want globe-trotting adventure: Fool's Gold → Hitler's Finger → The Star of Simbako
If you want Sam Harris at her toughest: The Pink Elephants → Digging Deeper → Concrete Jungle
If you want family drama with an Irish backdrop: Rebel Green → Africa Green
If you're reading with young children: My Silly Auntie → Daddy's New Shed → Granny's Cat → Tilly's Sandcastle

PJ Skinner was born in Guildford and is one of seven siblings. When she was six, her family moved to Ireland, where she went to school and spent most of her early life. That split between England and Ireland later became an important part of her fiction.

She studied geology at Trinity College Dublin, then left university for a career that took her far beyond any office. After graduating, she spent about 35 years as an exploration geologist, working in more than thirty countries, often in remote parts of Africa and South America. It was demanding work, and she has spoken plainly about the misogyny and danger that could come with it.

It also gave her a lifetime's worth of stories.

Skinner has said she began writing because ordinary conversation never seemed big enough for the job she had done. She had seen strange sites, tense workplaces, difficult politics, and the kind of situations that are hard to explain to anyone outside the industry. Fiction gave her a way to shape those experiences without turning them into memoir.

That background feeds straight into the Sam Harris novels, which start with Fool's Gold. Sam, a young geologist working in the late 1980s and 1990s, is often described by Skinner as an alter ego, though not a direct self-portrait. In books such as Hitler's Finger and Digging Deeper, readers get remote camps, political trouble, moral pressure, and a heroine who has to think her way through danger rather than blast her way out.

Those books appeal to readers who like adventure grounded in real work, real places, and real limits. Skinner's fiction is full of travel, culture shock, corruption, and the awkward fact that courage does not always look glamorous. Her settings matter, and so do the small choices that show what a person is made of.

Her childhood in Ireland pushed her in a different direction. Writing as Kate Foley, she launched the Green Family saga with Rebel Green, then followed it with Africa Green. Those books trade mine sites for family strains, belonging, memory, and the long shadow of the Troubles, while keeping the same interest in people under pressure.

Home, in one form or another, is one of her recurring subjects.

Skinner has also moved across genres. After relocating to the south coast of England just before the COVID pandemic, she branched out into science fiction, cozy mystery, and children's books. The Tilly stories, including My Silly Auntie, show a lighter side of her writing, but they still have the same eye for family dynamics, everyday absurdity, and the way a small moment can open into a full story.

What links all her work is her interest in capable women, difficult workplaces, family ties, and settings that refuse to sit quietly in the background. These days she continues to write from England, drawing on a life that has been unusually wide-ranging and very hard to fake.