Sabine Durrant Books in Order

If you want a tense domestic thriller first: Under Your Skin → Remember Me This Way
If you like sun-soaked suspense and bad choices: Lie with Me → Take Me In → Sun Damage
If you want sharp contemporary fiction before the thrillers: Having It and Eating It → The Great Indoors
If you want her YA diary stories: Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles → Bon Voyage, Connie Pickles / Ooh La La! Connie Pickles

Sabine Durrant is a British novelist and journalist who spent years in newspaper and magazine offices before fiction became the main job. She worked on editorial teams at The Independent, The Sunday Times, and The Guardian, and that background shows up all through her books. She notices the small social tells, the awkward pauses, and the tiny bits of self-invention people hope no one else will spot.

That eye for detail is a big part of her fiction.

Durrant often starts with lives that look ordinary from the outside: a marriage, a neighbourhood, a holiday, a school-run routine, a house full of things. Then she lets a lie, a secret, or a bad decision work away at the edges. Many of her books sit in the territory often called domestic noir, and several are rooted in south London, where familiar streets and homes become places of pressure, envy, and dread.

Her first novels, Having It and Eating It and The Great Indoors, lean more toward sharp contemporary fiction. They are funny, observant books about domestic life, relationships, class nerves, and the stories people tell themselves to stay comfortable. With Under Your Skin, though, she moved firmly into psychological suspense. That novel, about a woman whose polished life begins to splinter after she finds a body, set the tone for much of what followed.

Then the temperature really went up.

Books like Remember Me This Way, Lie with Me, Take Me In, Finders, Keepers, and Sun Damage show what readers come to Durrant for: clever tension, messy motives, and narrators who are often not telling the whole truth, sometimes not even to themselves. Lie with Me became a Richard and Judy Book Club pick and a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller, but the appeal is easy to describe in plainer terms. She is very good at writing people who want more than they have, and who keep making the exact choices that make things worse.

She can be very funny, too.

That lighter touch is easy to see in the Connie Pickles books for younger readers, Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles and Bon Voyage, Connie Pickles. They are diary-style stories about growing up, friendship, family chaos, crushes, and embarrassment, with a heroine who is dramatic, earnest, and hard not to root for. Even in these books, Durrant is interested in how people present themselves, and how badly life can refuse to follow the script.

There is personal depth behind the fiction as well. In her essay At Sea, she looked into the life and death of her father, a Fleet Air Arm pilot who disappeared off the Dorset coast a few months after she was born. She has also written about growing up in Britain as an only child, which fits with a larger pattern in her work: she is alert to loneliness, to people on the edge of groups, and to the long after-effects of family history.

She lives in Balham, south London, and in 2025 she was appointed a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at Roehampton. Put all of that together, the journalism, the sharp social observation, the dark humor, the interest in family secrets, and you get books that feel grounded even when they are twisting the knife.