Stephanie Merritt (Giordano Bruno) Books in Order

This version of the series view sits at the point where Stephanie Merritt the critic and novelist meets Giordano Bruno the sixteenth century philosopher she sends stalking through Tudor England. It is for readers who want to link the stories on the page back to the person who writes them.

Merritt built her career first as a reviewer and editor, studying English at Cambridge and then spending years at The Observer before going freelance. She has written for papers and magazines across the British press and appears regularly as a cultural commentator, so she comes to historical fiction with a strong sense of how stories travel between page, stage and audience.

In the Giordano Bruno novels she takes a real figure, an Italian Dominican friar and thinker who was eventually executed in Rome for heresy, and imagines what might have happened during his years of wandering across Europe. The historical Bruno argued for an infinite universe and questioned religious and political orthodoxy, and those habits of mind make him an ideal guide through a world of espionage, persecution and violent argument.

Writing as S J Parris, Merritt puts this version of Bruno to work as a reluctant spy and investigator. In Heresy, Prophecy, Sacrilege and the later novels he moves from university cloisters to royal courts, French palaces and crowded ports, bringing with him a library full of forbidden books and a sharp sense of how easily power can twist faith. The same interest in outsiders, factions and group loyalty runs through her contemporary fiction under her own name, from the campus tensions of Gaveston to the rehearsal room betrayals of Real and the isolated houses of While You Sleep and Storm.

Seen together, the Bruno thrillers and the modern novels feel like two halves of one long conversation about belief, performance and the stories people tell to stay afloat.

This page draws that connection out. Here you can view the Bruno books explicitly as part of Stephanie Merritt's wider writing life, rather than as a separate brand. It is a useful place to decide whether to start with the historical investigations and then move to the contemporary psychological thrillers, or to do the journey in reverse and come to Bruno once you know the author's voice in the present day.

Whichever route you take, the link between Merritt and her heretical philosopher hero is the same. She is drawn to characters who live slightly to one side of their societies, whether that means a sixteenth century thinker dodging inquisitors or a modern actor, widowed mother or journalist trying to navigate their own private crises. The Bruno books simply let her explore those questions against a backdrop of religious war, coded letters and candlelit rooms.