Tom Rob Smith Books in Order

If you want Cold War crime and political paranoia: Child 44 → The Secret Speech → Agent 6.
If you prefer a contemporary psychological mystery: The Farm.
If you like big speculative ideas and dystopian stakes: Cold People.
If you enjoy character driven espionage stories: London Spy.
If you are curious about the Rescuing Eloise duet: Be With You Never → Love Together.

Tom Rob Smith was born in London in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and grew up in Norbury in south London. As a kid he loved stories, filling school days with homemade plays and early attempts at thrillers rather than anything too serious or literary.

He went to Dulwich College, where he kept writing for fun and began to understand that he was happiest when he was shaping characters and scenes on the page. At university he studied English literature at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating in 2001 with a first.

A postgraduate scholarship then sent him to Italy for a year of creative writing at the University of Pavia, a period he has described as a chance to take his private ambition to write and treat it as real work. After Italy he moved into television, working as a scriptwriter and script editor, including a stint with the BBC.

One of his first big assignments was story lining Cambodia's first soap opera, which meant long days in Phnom Penh thinking about cliffhangers, character arcs and how to keep viewers coming back after each ad break. Those years in TV sharpened his sense of pace and structure.

When he finally turned back to an idea that had been nagging at him, a murder story set in Stalin's Soviet Union, he brought that same drive for momentum to the page. The result was Child 44, written in his mid twenties, in which security officer Leo Demidov hunts a serial killer in a country that officially claims there is no crime.

The novel sold around the world, was translated into many languages and picked up a string of prizes, including the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and an International Thriller Writers award. It also grew into a full trilogy with The Secret Speech and Agent 6, following Leo and his family through the thaw after Stalin's death, the Hungarian uprising, the Cold War and a long, painful search for justice that stretches from Moscow to New York and Afghanistan.

Rather than stay forever in one corner of history, Smith shifted gears with The Farm, a psychological thriller inspired in part by his mother's experience of psychosis. The book is told through a son caught between two parents, each insisting they alone are telling the truth about a crime in rural Sweden. It is tense, but also very intimate, and it shows his interest in how families work when trust breaks down.

With Cold People he stepped into speculative fiction while keeping his eye on ordinary people under pressure. The novel imagines an alien force that pushes humankind to the edge of extinction and forces the survivors to rebuild life in Antarctica, asking what it would really mean to redesign ourselves in order to survive.

Alongside the novels he has built a busy career in television. He created the BBC drama London Spy, a love story that collides with the world of espionage, then wrote every episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, which went on to win major awards for limited series. Later projects such as MotherFatherSon and Class of '09 keep returning to questions of power, loyalty and how people behave when institutions start to crack.

Smith has spent much of his working life between the United Kingdom and the United States, moving back and forth as books and television work demand. In interviews he talks about early mornings at his desk, a lot of quiet research and the simple satisfaction of getting a story to land. Across crime, psychological suspense and speculative futures, his work circles the same core ideas, the secrets people carry and what it costs to finally bring them into the light.