After spending her childhood in Zimbabwe, Paula Hawkins moved to London at the age of seventeen. She studied philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford, and went onto work as a business journalist for the Times.
Her first novel, Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista – an entertaining slice of romantic comedy – came out in 2009, published under the pen name of Amy Silver. This was followed by three further novels under the same pseudonym, until in 2015 she rose to the top of the charts with her ingenious and irresistibly dark psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train – the first of her books published under her own name. Mining the troubled relationships of three women, it became a record-breaking bestseller and was made into a film starring Emily Blunt in 2016. It was followed by Into the Water (2017), A Slow Fire Burning (2021) and The Blue Hour (2024).
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