Alice Feeney

Alice Feeney grew up in Essex in the late 1970s, in a household where books were always close to hand. Long before a writing career seemed plausible, she was scribbling stories on scraps of paper — a habit that never really left her. In her early twenties she joined the BBC under the name Alison Feeney-Hart, spending roughly fifteen years working as a reporter, news editor, and producer, including on the One O'Clock News and across arts and entertainment programming. The newsroom gave her an intimate understanding of how stories are constructed, shaped, and told to mass audiences — skills that would prove extraordinarily useful once she turned to fiction.

She began drafting her debut novel, Sometimes I Lie, around the time she turned thirty, writing on the commute and during lunch breaks, before refining it through a Faber Academy writing course. The novel sold at auction and was published in 2017, allowing her to leave journalism and write full time. That first book set the template for everything that followed: an unreliable narrator, fractured timelines, and a mystery that unfolds as much inside the protagonist's head as anywhere else. Amber Reynolds lies in a coma, aware of everything around her but unable to speak, as childhood diaries and recent memories collide. It became an international bestseller and was optioned for television.

Her subsequent novels deepened and widened those preoccupations. I Know Who You Are (2019) followed an actress whose husband vanishes and whose buried past refuses to stay buried. His & Hers (2020) wove together two perspectives on a murder in a small English town, each narrator with very good reasons to conceal the truth. The book was later adapted as a Netflix series, premiering in January 2026 and starring Tessa Thompson and Jon Bernthal, produced by Jessica Chastain's Freckle Films.

Rock Paper Scissors (2021) took a couple to a remote Scottish chapel for a weekend that quickly turns sinister, and is also in development for a Netflix adaptation. Daisy Darker (2022) drew on the tradition of classic Golden Age crime fiction, gathering a family on a tidal island in a story that pays clear homage to Agatha Christie. Good Bad Girl (2023) shifted register slightly, weaving together an elderly woman's plot to escape a care home with a cold-case murder spanning two decades.

Throughout her career, Feeney has been described as the Queen of Twists — a label earned through consistent structural ingenuity rather than mere shock value. Her novels are less concerned with the mechanics of whodunits than with why ordinary people lie, and what those lies cost them. Memory, marriage, and the distance between public and private selves recur across her work as genuine obsessions rather than genre conventions.

Beautiful Ugly (2025) and her eighth novel, My Husband's Wife (2026), continue to expand her range. The latter follows an author whose wife disappears by a cliff edge, only for him to spot a woman who looks exactly like her on a remote Scottish island a year later — a premise that showcases her gift for premise-level hooks that sustain themselves across the full length of a novel.

A New York Times and Sunday Times multi-million-copy bestselling author, her books have been translated into forty languages. She now lives in the Devon countryside with her family, and describes herself first and foremost as a reader — someone chasing pace, empathy, and the pleasure of a story that keeps you turning pages well past midnight.