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Paula Hawkins

Author of the global phenomenon The Girl on the Train — psychological thrillers with unreliable narrators and suffocating dread.

Psychological Thriller Domestic Suspense Mystery

About Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins was born in Zimbabwe and moved to London in her twenties. She spent years writing personal finance books under her own name and four romantic comedies under a pen name before The Girl on the Train became one of the fastest-selling adult debuts in publishing history. Published in January 2015, it spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted into a film with Emily Blunt in 2016.

Hawkins specialises in unreliable female narrators trapped by memory, addiction, and the lies people tell in intimate relationships. Her books are set in Britain and built around the slow revelation of what everyone has been hiding.

Unreliable Narrator British Thriller Domestic Noir Female Protagonists

Novels

The Girl on the Train cover
Standalone — Start Here
The Girl on the Train
2015
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and watches the same couple in a trackside house — they seem to have the perfect life she's lost. Then the woman goes missing. Told from three female perspectives, all of them hiding something. The book that sparked a wave of domestic suspense. Compulsive, twisty, and darkly funny.
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Into the Water cover
Standalone
Into the Water
2017
A woman is found drowned in the same stretch of river where her teenage daughter's friend died weeks before. Her estranged sister arrives to care for the daughter — and starts uncovering the town's dark history. More ambitious in structure than The Girl on the Train, with multiple perspectives. Darker and stranger.
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A Slow Fire Burning cover
Standalone
A Slow Fire Burning
2021
A young man is found murdered on a houseboat in London. Three women are suspects — each damaged, each with a reason to want him dead, and each hiding their own history of violence. Hawkins at her most controlled and sinister.
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Reading Guide

Where to start

The Girl on the Train is the obvious starting point — and not just because it's her most famous. It's genuinely her most accessible and propulsive.

If you love that, A Slow Fire Burning is her best-crafted novel and shows how much her writing has developed. Into the Water is the most divisive — readers either love the complex structure or find it overcrowded.

All three are completely standalone. No need to read in any order.