Polly Crosby Books in Order

Polly Crosby grew up in Walberswick on the Suffolk coast, a place of marshes, sea light and big skies that keeps turning up in her fiction. She now lives in the heart of Norfolk with her husband, son, and a scruffy lurcher called Nell. Nature is central to her work, and so are the landscapes of East Anglia, where coast, countryside, and old buildings seem to hold on to memory.

She writes the sort of stories where place matters.

A big turning point came in 2018. Crosby won the Curtis Brown Creative Yesterday Scholarship, which helped her finish her debut novel, and she also received the Annabel Abbs scholarship for the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. Around the same time, The Illustrated Child was runner-up in the Bridport Prize's Peggy Chapman Andrews Award for a First Novel.

Her debut, The Illustrated Child, published in some countries as The Book of Hidden Wonders, already showed many of the things that define her fiction. It follows Romilly Kemp, a girl turned into the star of her father's illustrated children's books, and turns a puzzle-filled treasure hunt into a painful family story. A lot of the pull comes from that balance of beauty and unease, with hidden clues, emotional damage, and a child trying to understand the adults around her.

There is a family link to art in the background too. Before she married, Crosby's surname was Robinson, and she has written about growing up with stories of her connection to the Heath Robinson brothers and the illustrator Charles Robinson. That feels like a neat fit for a writer so interested in pictures, old objects, and the secret life of books.

Her later adult novels keep building on those interests. The Women of Pearl Island brings grief and buried history to a remote island, while Vita and the Birds moves between 1938 and 1997, following a controlling family, an unexpected bond between two women, and the long shadow of a secret. In The House of Fever, published in 2024, she shifts to a 1930s sanatorium and another story full of illness, tension, and things people would rather leave buried.

She doesn't only write for adults.

Crosby has also written for younger readers, including This Tale is Forbidden and The Vulpine. She has spoken openly about living with cystic fibrosis, and that experience directly informed The Vulpine, which imagines a world where illness and difference are pushed out of sight. Across both her adult and teen books, certain threads keep coming back: girls and women trying to make sense of the past, families built on secrets, and landscapes that feel almost alive.

She is still based in Norfolk, still writing across age groups, and still drawn to stories with a strong sense of place. If you like fiction with coastal weather, old houses, buried truths, and just a touch of the gothic, her books are easy to sink into.