Lucinda Berry

Ran research on childhood trauma before turning to fiction, and the novels are unusually precise about what psychological damage actually looks like from the inside.

The Perfect Child gives an infertile couple a foster daughter found abandoned in a hospital car park, and then slowly establishes that the child is not what the reader was set up to expect.

Berry writes short chapters and switches perspective often, and her books are consistently bleaker than their marketing suggests. She is candid that the clinical background is what makes the endings unwilling to console.