Sheena Kamal Books in Order

If you want the full Nora Watts arc: The Lost Ones / Eyes Like Mine → In The Grip Of It → It All Falls Down → No Going Back
If you want the main novels only: The Lost Ones / Eyes Like Mine → It All Falls Down → No Going Back
If you want a quick taste of Nora first: The Lost Ones / Eyes Like Mine → In The Grip Of It
If you want a YA standalone: Fight Like a Girl

Sheena Kamal was born in Trinidad and moved to Canada when she was six. That early shift shows up again and again in how she talks about childhood: home and the public library felt safe, while school often felt like a place where she had to brace herself.

Before she published fiction, she studied political science at the University of Toronto and won a TD Canada Trust scholarship for community leadership and activism around homelessness. The social questions in her books, who gets ignored, who gets protected, who gets left to fend for themselves, did not arrive there by accident.

They were there from the start.

After university, Kamal swerved toward performance and film. She worked as an actor, an extra, a stand-in, and a stunt double, and later as a researcher and development coordinator for film and television. While working in a Toronto production office, she began taking writing seriously, starting with the idea of a woman whose adopted daughter has gone missing and who does not trust the authorities to help.

That idea became The Lost Ones, published in the UK as Eyes Like Mine. It introduced Nora Watts, one of Kamal's signature characters: sharp, wounded, funny in a dry way, and always a little out of step with the world around her. The book won the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, a Strand Critics Award, and the Macavity Award, and it helped put Kamal on the map for readers who like thrillers with real emotional wear and tear.

She stayed with Nora in It All Falls Down and No Going Back, widening the series from a missing-person case into a larger story about family history, violence, race, power, and survival. Readers tend to come for the speed and danger, then stay for Nora's voice and the way Kamal keeps the books grounded in social reality, especially around women who are easy for society to overlook.

Kamal took a different path with Fight Like a Girl, her first YA novel. The book follows Trisha, a Toronto teenager of Trinidadian descent who throws herself into Muay Thai while trying to break a cycle of violence at home. Kamal has practiced Muay Thai for years, and that lived-in knowledge gives the novel a physical, restless energy.

She likes characters who carry damage but keep moving.

Across her work, certain themes keep returning. She writes about outsiders, about the long aftershocks of trauma, and about how class, gender, and race shape a person's chances in Canada. She has also published essays and short fiction, and the same alertness to social pressure and private grief runs through that work too.

Kamal's own route to writing was not straight, which may be one reason her protagonists rarely feel polished or settled. They improvise, they misjudge people, they push forward anyway. She has lived and worked in both Toronto and Vancouver, and Vancouver in particular gives the Nora Watts books much of their rain, tension, and mood. She continues to write in Canada, bringing together politics, pulp momentum, and a sharp eye for people who live near the edge of the frame.