Saskia Sarginson Books in Order

Saskia Sarginson was born in Manchester in 1961 and grew up in Suffolk. Her childhood was spent with her mother, brother, and sister in a small cottage surrounded by pine forest. Deer came close to the door, and the children had ponies, cats, rabbits, and goats as well as plenty of room to roam.

That mix of freedom, landscape, and slightly wild childhood imagination has stayed with her.

Before turning to novels, Sarginson built a varied writing life. She studied Fashion Design and Communication at St. Martin's School of Art, then read English Literature at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. She worked as a health and beauty editor on women's magazines, wrote journalism and columns, and also worked as a script reader, copywriter, ghostwriter, and fiction editor.

She had been writing poetry and short stories since childhood, but fiction did not become a serious career plan until later. At Cambridge, where she was a mature student bringing up three young children while studying full time, her tutors encouraged her creative work. That support made her take her own writing more seriously.

It still took time.

After completing a first novel, Sarginson found an agent, only to see potential publishing deals fall through. A second book also failed to find a home. She enrolled in Royal Holloway's Creative Writing MA, graduating with distinction, and used the course to sharpen her editing skills and keep going through the setbacks.

Her fourth completed novel, The Twins, became her fiction debut in 2013. It follows adult twins Isolte and Viola as a troubled shared past resurfaces. The book introduced the family secrets, shifting viewpoints, and emotional tension that run through much of her work. Without You takes readers to the Suffolk coast, where a teenager's disappearance leaves one sister determined to find her. In The Other Me, a woman living under an assumed identity must confront a buried family history that reaches back to wartime Germany.

Sarginson moves easily between psychological suspense and love stories. The Stranger centers on a widow whose life is disrupted by an outsider and by discoveries about her late husband. How It Ends, published in the United States as The Wonderful, follows a girl on a U.S. airbase in 1950s England as she tries to understand a devastating family tragedy. Her later novels, including The Bench, The Central Line, Seven Months of Summer, Identical, and One Dark Summer, return to questions of trust, missed connections, memory, and the danger inside apparently safe homes.

Suffolk remains an important setting in her fiction, especially its coast, forests, and isolated houses. She lives in London with her husband, Alex, and has four grown children and a grandchild. Away from the desk, she enjoys Argentine tango, dog walking, and baking cakes, which sounds like a sensible balance for someone who spends so much time inventing secrets.