Anna Snoekstra Books in Order

Anna Snoekstra was born in Canberra, Australia, in 1988 and grew up in the city's suburbs. Her parents worked as civil servants, and the close-knit, watchful feeling of smaller communities would later become part of the atmosphere in her fiction.

Writing was not always an obvious path. Snoekstra has spoken about struggling with hearing issues and reading during her early school years, which knocked her confidence. Once stories clicked, though, she began writing her own, including strange historical tales with a streak of horror.

At seventeen, she moved to Melbourne with a firm plan to become a writer rather than settle into a conventional full-time job. She studied Creative Writing and Cinema at the University of Melbourne, then trained in screenwriting at RMIT University.

It wasn't a straight line.

After university, Snoekstra wrote for independent films and fringe theatre and directed music videos. She also took a long list of day jobs, including work as a cheesemonger, waitress, barista, nanny, receptionist, cinema attendant, and film reviewer. Those years gave her plenty of chances to watch how people present one version of themselves while carrying another underneath.

Her first novel, Only Daughter, arrived in 2016. It begins with a desperate woman claiming to be a teenager who vanished years earlier, then lets both the missing girl and her impostor tell the story. The book established a pattern readers can expect from Snoekstra: a tense setup, flawed women at the center, and secrets that become more dangerous the closer someone gets to the truth.

In Little Secrets, an aspiring journalist investigates a frightened country town after a deadly fire and a series of unsettling doll deliveries. The Spite Game takes a darker look at old school cruelty and revenge. Snoekstra's thrillers often put ambition, shame, loyalty, and self-preservation under pressure, especially when a person feels trapped by money, family, a town, or their own past.

She also writes for younger readers. Mercy Point follows five teenagers in a mountain town who connect anonymously online through questions about their adoptions, only to find a much bigger mystery waiting for them. In Out of Breath, a young woman looking for a fresh start in remote Western Australia is drawn into an off-grid community that may not be the refuge it promises.

Snoekstra released her first audio drama, This Isn’t Happening, in 2023, bringing her screenwriting background to a compact cat-and-mouse thriller. Her 2025 novel, The Ones We Love, follows an Australian family in Los Angeles whose secrets begin to crack open after their daughter returns from a party with no memory of what happened. Snoekstra lives in Naarm/Melbourne and writes from an old football factory in Thornbury. Her novels have reached readers in more than twenty countries and sixteen languages.