38 books like Two Steps

I learned to read at four and have been telling stories ever since. Books were my escape from unhappiness into a new and endless world. Left to myself, I’d read ten or so weekly, and my mind was packed with characters, dialogue, jokes, prose, and poetry like an over-brimming literary reservoir. Words are my thing, and I am an avid collector of them. I was reading David Copperfield at eight and specialised in 18th and 19th-century literature at university. I’ve written five books and am working on the sixth. I love writing humour but have also authored Jane Austen Fan Fiction and poetry. Without books, my world is nothing.

I’ve always loved the idea of time travel. I was born in a Northern mill town where King Cotton ruled. By the time I was a teenager, all the mills had shut, leaving behind empty hulks. I desperately wanted to experience the town in its heyday. I devoured the Blackburn-set memoir The Road to Nab End, by William Woodruff: I could hear the clogs strike the cobbles, picture the waves of workers, smell the belching chimneys. While I couldn’t travel back in time for real, I could in my imagination. My debut children’s novel, out in Spring 2026, is about a time-travelling seventh son. 

Sandy is a writer, traveller, and hopeful romantic with a lengthy bucket list, and many of her travel adventures have found homes in her novels. She’s also an avid reader, a film buff, a wine lover, and a coffee snob. She lives in Melbourne, Australia with her partner, Ben, who she met while travelling in Greece. Their real-life love story inspired Sandy’s debut novel One Summer in Santorini, the first in the five-book Holiday Romance series. The series continues in Paris, Sydney, Bali, and Tuscany. Sandy's standalone novel The Christmas Swap celebrates her favourite time of the year, and her rom-com, The Dating Game, is set in the world of Reality TV.

I’m a writer with two sisters very different from me in lifestyle. For example, one went into nursing (I hate blood!), and one was a bookkeeper (I also hate numbers!) I first wrote about loving but dissimilar sisters in a cozy series called The Sleuth Sisters Mysteries, under the pen name Maggie Pill. The books are fun, and readers often tell me which of the sisters they most identify with. “I’m Barb,” or “I’m the nice one.” Seven books later, I found I wanted to examine the darker side of sisterhood. What if things your sister does (or sisters do) make you uncomfortable? What wins: family loyalty or personal integrity?

In today’s world, where negativity and dire situations can easily bombard us, I need to consistently ground myself in hope and light. Real stories about transformation and unconditional love are not only uplifting and hopeful, they are also around every corner. Every one of us is capable of transformation and the giving and receiving of unconditional love. It’s through transformation and unconditional love that we may better understand what it means to be human and, thus, build our capacity for compassion for one another. Through compassion, we can create a better world.

I grew up in a household with a secret at its center, one that I've long suspected held trauma. Long before the formation of the family I was born into, my mother was a divorcee with a young child, my eldest sister (a fact I only found out by finding a photo of my parents’ wedding with my sister in it!). My mother refused to tell my sister anything about her biological father or the circumstances of the divorce, saying only that she “preferred to pretend that part of her life had never happened.” I never did learn the full story. Needless to say, novels that give their protagonist that chance are very close to my heart.

I learned to read at four and have been telling stories ever since. Books were my escape from unhappiness into a new and endless world. Left to myself, I’d read ten or so weekly, and my mind was packed with characters, dialogue, jokes, prose, and poetry like an over-brimming literary reservoir. Words are my thing, and I am an avid collector of them. I was reading David Copperfield at eight and specialised in 18th and 19th-century literature at university. I’ve written five books and am working on the sixth. I love writing humour but have also authored Jane Austen Fan Fiction and poetry. Without books, my world is nothing.

I always intended to be a fiction writer (and have written ten novels, both YA and adult) but my oldest child is autistic, which led to my meeting and then collaborating on several non-fiction books with Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel, who’s an expert in the autism field, currently at Stanford University. Finding myself writing non-fiction wasn’t the only way having an autistic child changed my life. When my son was first diagnosed, I didn’t know what that meant for his future, and I desperately wanted information—and even entertainment—that made me feel inspired and hopeful. I needed to find my way toward feeling positive and not anxious, for both our sakes.

I always intended to be a fiction writer (and have written ten novels, both YA and adult) but my oldest child is autistic, which led to my meeting and then collaborating on several non-fiction books with Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel, who’s an expert in the autism field, currently at Stanford University. Finding myself writing non-fiction wasn’t the only way having an autistic child changed my life. When my son was first diagnosed, I didn’t know what that meant for his future, and I desperately wanted information—and even entertainment—that made me feel inspired and hopeful. I needed to find my way toward feeling positive and not anxious, for both our sakes.

I’m a Professor of Women’s Mental Health and have worked clinically, taught, and researched in the area of perinatal psychiatry for over thirty years. I do forensic psychiatry related to this; all this guides the books I write. I am passionate about promoting mental health and helping everyone understand the high level of trauma and its devastating effects on people; I have also been an avid reader of just about everything since I was eight, and love a gripping crime or psychological thriller. But it has to make sense, be authentic and not demonize mental illness; I have a particular hatred for the evil serial killer who was just “born that way”.