Sarah Henstra Books in Order

If you want the clearest tour of her fiction: Mad Miss Mimic → The Red Word → We Contain Multitudes → The Lost Tarot
If you want her prizewinning adult novel first: The Red Word → The Lost Tarot
If you prefer young adult fiction: Mad Miss Mimic → We Contain Multitudes
If you want historical atmosphere and mystery: Mad Miss Mimic → The Lost Tarot

Sarah Henstra is a Canadian novelist and teacher whose work often puts smart, searching characters inside systems that do not make life easy for them. Her family roots are in the Holland Marsh north of Toronto, a farming community shaped by Dutch immigrants, and she spent part of her childhood on the coast of British Columbia before returning to Ontario as a teenager.

That mix of places matters. Henstra's books tend to notice landscape, class, and social codes, whether she is writing about Victorian London, a 1990s college campus, or an art world mystery that stretches across decades. Alongside fiction, she studied twentieth-century British literature, earned a PhD at the University of Toronto, and now teaches English and creative writing at Toronto Metropolitan University, including courses on creative writing, the Gothic, and fairy tales.

For her, writing seems to be less about waiting for inspiration and more about building a habit that can survive ordinary life.

In interviews, Henstra has talked about an early attempt to write a novel during her first undergraduate year, when she moved to Holland and imagined a whole year of open time. It did not happen. What finally worked was structure, early mornings, borrowed hours, and a small daily goal. While teaching full time and raising kids, she realized that 250 words a day could add up to a book by year's end. That idea, the slow accumulation of pages, became central to how she works.

Her first novel, Mad Miss Mimic, arrived in 2015 and showed a lot of what she likes to do on the page. It is a young adult historical mystery set in 1872 London, with a heroine whose speech disorder leaves her underestimated even as it gives her an unusual gift for mimicry. The book made several year-end lists and was shortlisted for awards for teen readers. Readers who pick it up for the romance and intrigue usually stay for Leonora's stubborn intelligence and the way Henstra mixes social detail with suspense.

Then The Red Word made a much bigger public splash.

Published in 2018, it follows a college sophomore caught between a notorious fraternity and a house of radical feminists, and it won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction. It was later nominated for the Dublin International Literary Award and the Republic of Consciousness Award. Henstra does not treat the campus politics as easy or tidy, which is part of why the book still gets talked about. Her next novel, We Contain Multitudes, shifts into a warmer but still high-stakes register, telling a love story between two teenage boys through letters written for an English class assignment. That book became the 2022 Vermont Reads selection and was shortlisted for the White Pine Award. Then came The Lost Tarot, a 2024 novel that moves between Toronto and England and folds together academia, art, deception, and the occult around a legendary missing deck of cards.

Across these books, some patterns keep returning. Henstra writes about power, gender, secrecy, desire, and the messy ways people learn to speak for themselves. She is also drawn to intense settings, classrooms, cultish groups, families, closed social worlds, where ideas can turn personal very fast. Some readers come for the plot machinery, but the emotional knot underneath is usually the point.

She still lives in Toronto.

She has said she often writes in the early morning or in cafes, because limits help her focus. That feels fitting. Henstra's fiction is intellectually curious, but it is also grounded in routine, work, and the daily effort of getting words down before the rest of the day takes over.