Stephanie Merritt (SJ Parris) (Giordano Bruno) Books in Order

This combined view makes no secret of the fact that Stephanie Merritt and S J Parris are the same writer, and that the Giordano Bruno novels grow out of the same mind that produced her contemporary fiction and memoir. It is designed for readers who are curious about how the two names and the different kinds of books fit together.

Merritt began by reviewing and editing other people's work, then stepped sideways into writing her own novels and non fiction. When she decided to try historical crime she chose the S J Parris pseudonym so that readers would know at a glance that they were in for a Tudor era thriller rather than a campus story or a modern ghost tale. Under that name she built the Bruno sequence, following an exiled philosopher through courts, colleges, ports and prisons as he is drawn into murders and conspiracies.

Under her real name she has written books that look outward at power and performance in the present day, and inward at mental health. Gaveston and Real explore how charisma, ambition and obsession play out in universities and theatre companies. While You Sleep strands a woman on a remote Scottish island in a house that might be haunted by the past. Storm traps old friends in a luxury French chateau and lets resentments bubble to the surface. The Devil Within steps away from fiction altogether to chart her own experience of depression and recovery.

The details change from book to book, but the same questions about belief, loyalty, secrets and self deception keep surfacing.

Seen alongside that work, the Giordano Bruno series reads like a historical cousin to the modern stories. Bruno is another outsider looking in on tight communities, another figure trying to hold on to a sense of self while the institutions around him demand obedience. The religious disputes, coded letters and court intrigues of sixteenth century Europe echo the boardrooms, rehearsal rooms and family houses of her contemporary writing.

This page lets you move easily between those strands. You can chart how themes travel from the memoir into the fiction, or how the skills of a long time critic shape the pacing and structure of a historical thriller. It is a useful starting point if you have met Merritt through her journalism and want to see what she does with a long narrative, or if you have raced through the Bruno books and are wondering which of the titles under her own name to try next.

However you read the shelves, remembering that Stephanie Merritt and S J Parris are the same person makes the whole body of work feel more connected. It turns the Giordano Bruno novels from a self contained series into part of a larger project about how people think, believe and survive, whether they are living under the eye of the Tudor state or in the glare of twenty first century life.