Sarah Bourne Books in Order

Sarah Bourne was born and brought up in London. Her adult life has taken her further afield, including time in the United States and Japan, before she settled in Sydney, Australia. She has raised her family there and calls Australia home.

Before writing novels, Bourne spent many years working in mental health. She continues to work as a counsellor and also teaches Iyengar yoga. Both roles put her close to the complicated ways people cope, connect, avoid the truth, and try again.

Writing arrived almost by accident.

In 2006, when her three children were getting older, Bourne decided to write a short story to fill some time. The short story grew into a young adult paranormal romance trilogy, shaped by the ghost stories surrounding Berry Pomeroy Castle in Devon. The experience taught her that writing was hard work, but it also made her want to keep going.

She was hooked.

Bourne later turned to adult fiction, beginning with Never Laugh at Shadows and Two Lives. Her books tend to start with people under pressure, often carrying private grief, guilt, memories, or questions they have avoided for too long. She has said she likes to begin with an issue that interests her, build a plot around it, and then see where the characters take her.

That approach is clear in The Train, a 2021 novel about eight strangers whose lives are shaken after a woman dies in front of their commuter train. It is less interested in the mechanics of the tragedy than in what it wakes up in the witnesses: regret, fear, stalled ambitions, and the uncomfortable knowledge that life can change in a moment.

Her next novel, Ella's War, moves into postwar Britain. Ella wakes after a car accident unable to remember who she is, then uses letters and diaries to uncover her past as a wartime nurse. Bourne combines a mystery about identity with the lingering damage of war. In InVisible, she follows Laila from London to Pakistan and Afghanistan after a terrorist attack and detention upend her life, asking difficult questions about suspicion, freedom, and belonging.

Place matters in her work. Exile takes Kirstie to the Shetland island of Yell after a destructive affair, where a remote family croft and a difficult relationship with her mother force her to face old wounds. Letting Go stays close to one family in the final days of Walter Armstrong's life, as death doula Hester Rose helps them navigate grief, resentment, and secrets.

Her historical novel The Paris Resistance returns to the Second World War through Miriam Renaud, a Jewish woman drawn into resistance work in occupied Paris. It grew from Bourne's interest in what came after a war officially ended: the losses, unfinished lives, need for revenge, and hard work of forgiveness.

Away from the desk, Bourne enjoys getting to the beach and into the Australian bush with friends. Her life as a counsellor, yoga teacher, reader, and writer gives her fiction a steady interest in what people do when the ground shifts beneath them.