[6][7] MacLeod is an occasional contributor to BBC Radio 4, The Sunday Times and The Guardian, and has appeared at numerous literary festivals in the UK and internationally.
Her debut novel The Changeling (1996), is the story of the 18th-century historical figure, Anne Bonny, a cross-dressing woman who was sentenced to hang for piracy.
[11][12] The Wave Theory of Angels (2005) explored an actual 13th-century theological uproar and in a parallel storyline, controversies in the early 21st-century world of particle physics.
Described as "a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; it's a novel of staggering elegance and beauty."
and "Like her modernist forebears, Macleod knows that life and death, the terrible and the mundane always co-exist – her genius lies in illustrating these truths while simultaneously spinning a bona fide pageturner.