Gillian McAllister author photo
Image via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Gillian McAllister

Born: February 28, 1985 – Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands, United Kingdom

Gillian McAllister is a British suspense novelist whose psychological thrillers often revolve around family secrets, crime, and moral choices. She is best known for Wrong Place Wrong Time, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick, and for That Night and Just Another Missing Person; her novels have repeatedly reached the Sunday Times list.

Biography & Author's Journey

Gillian McAllister built her career from an ordinary Midlands background into a prominent place in contemporary British crime fiction. She grew up in Tamworth, attended a comprehensive school, and went on to the University of Birmingham, where she studied English and then law. A prolonged period of glandular fever in early adulthood left her unable to work for years; during that stretch she wrote an unpublished novel, then later returned to legal training and qualified while still trying to build a fiction career around commutes, evening writing sessions, and recurrent illness. That mix of literary ambition, legal discipline, and physical uncertainty shaped the pressures of her early life and, later, much of the emotional texture of her fiction. ((https://gillianmcallister.com/my-story/))

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Quotes

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Novels are never truly finished: you create a living thing when you write
-Five signs your book is ready to query
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I like to raise the question on the first page and answer it on the last
-Five ways to add tension to your novel
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When writing a novel we become blind to its flaws
-Five final steps before sending off a draft
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There is definitely no getting around the fact that writing a novel takes ages
-Five editing hacks
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I write the kind of fiction that is character-driven (is there really another kind?)
-5 Quick Ways to Create Vivid Characters
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Sometimes, it feels as though the whole world is succeeding
-Five ways to stay sane on submission
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I do a structural edit for each novel I write
-Five tips when facing a structural edit
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If this is you, it only takes one yes, whatever you’re doing
-My Story
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Probably only to tell my past self that, one day, I would be published
-Interview With an Author

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Community Voices

"Everything I've come to expect from Gillian McAllister!"

Freida McFadden

"Gillian McAllister is a writer at the top of her game"

Claire Douglas

"This marks Gillian McAllister as a new star in psychological thrillers"

Miranda Dickinson

"Gillian McAllister has done it again!"

Lisa Jewell

"With That Night, Gillian McAllister has secured her throne as the queen of the moral dilemma"

Holly Seddon

"Gillian McAllister's rattling, deeply satisfying book ranks among the best psychological-suspense thrillers of recent years"

A. J. Finn

"Gillian McAllister stunned me . . . and she will stun you too"

Jodi Picoult

"Gillian McAllister just gets better and better"

Clare Mackintosh

From Columbia University alumni built in San Francisco

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