Authors Like Kate Morton

Wilkie Collins

British · The Woman in White (1860), The Moonstone (1868)

Collins was born in London in 1824 and was a friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, whose magazine All the Year Round serialised The Woman in White in 1859–60. The novel, in which a young heiress is shut in an asylum under another woman's name, is told by several narrators in turn; The Moonstone is often called one of the first English detective novels. He died in 1889.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

British-American · Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), A Little Princess (1905), The Secret Garden (1911)

Burnett was born in Manchester in 1849, became a United States citizen in 1905 and died in New York in 1924. She conceived The Secret Garden in the walled rose garden at Maytham Hall, and its children, Mary and Dickon, are commemorated in a memorial in Central Park. In the late 1880s her fairy tale “The Story of Prince Fairy Foot” was found to be copied from Frances Browne's The Story of Fairyfoot; she apologised, saying she had remembered it from childhood.

Daphne du Maurier

British · Jamaica Inn (1936), Rebecca (1938), My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Du Maurier was born in London in 1907 and spent most of her life in Cornwall, where she died in 1989. Rebecca follows a young second wife at Manderley, where her husband’s dead first wife is present in every room. In 1941 critics pointed out similarities between Rebecca and the Brazilian writer Carolina Nabuco’s A Sucessora (1934); du Maurier said she had never heard of the book.

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A. S. Byatt

English · Possession (1990), The Children's Book (2009)

Byatt was born in Sheffield in 1936 and died in London in 2023; the novelist Margaret Drabble is her sister. Possession, winner of the 1990 Booker Prize, begins when a young scholar, Roland Michell, finds drafts of a love letter by the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash in the London Library and secretly takes them. With Maud Bailey he traces Ash's hidden romance with the poet Christabel LaMotte. The Children's Book follows a writer of fairy tales modelled on E. Nesbit.

Kazuo Ishiguro

British, born in Nagasaki · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England as a child; he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017. The Remains of the Day, winner of the 1989 Booker Prize, follows Stevens, the butler of Darlington Hall, on a motoring trip in 1956 as he looks back on decades of service to a lord who sympathised with the Nazis.

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Ian McEwan

British · Atonement (2001), On Chesil Beach (2007)

McEwan was born in Aldershot in 1948 and won the Booker Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. In Atonement, set on a country estate in the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis makes an accusation that sends an innocent man to prison, and spends her life as a novelist trying to write her way to forgiveness. In 2006 he was accused of borrowing from the nurse Lucilla Andrews's memoir for its wartime hospital scenes; he had acknowledged her in the book, and many writers defended him.

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Kate Atkinson

British · Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), Life After Life (2013), A God in Ruins (2015)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). In Life After Life, Ursula Todd, born in 1910, dies and is born again many times, living through the Blitz in different versions; it and A God in Ruins both won the Costa Novel Award.

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Diane Setterfield

English · The Thirteenth Tale (2006), Once Upon a River (2018)

Setterfield was born in 1964, grew up in Theale, Berkshire, and lives in Oxford. In The Thirteenth Tale, Margaret Lea, an amateur biographer who works in a bookshop, is commissioned by the famous and secretive novelist Vida Winter to write her life, and the story leads back to Angelfield, a family estate since burned and abandoned. The novel deliberately echoes Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Little Stranger (2009)

Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in 1966 and wrote a PhD on lesbian and gay historical fiction before her first novel, Tipping the Velvet (1998). Fingersmith, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, is set in 1860s London and a country house, where a young thief is sent as a maid to help swindle an heiress. The Little Stranger is a ghost story in a decaying Warwickshire house after the Second World War.

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Lucinda Riley

Northern Irish · The Orchid House (2010), The Seven Sisters (2014)

Riley was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1965 and died in 2021, aged 56. The Seven Sisters began a series in which adopted sisters each trace where they came from; seven novels appeared between 2014 and 2021, and after her death her son Harry Whittaker completed the series with Atlas: The Story of Pa Salt (2023).