Her 1996 novel A Vicious Circle was originally contracted to be published by Hamish Hamilton, but was cancelled after a libel threat from David Sexton, literary editor of the Evening Standard and former boyfriend of Craig's at Cambridge, fifteen years previously.
She has been praised by Allison Pearson in The Sunday Telegraph[11] for her "...wit, indignation, an ear for the telling phrase and an unflagging attention to all the individual choices by which we define ourselves – where we stand as a society and how we decline and fall."
Craig's fourth novel, In a Dark Wood, concerned the interplay between fairytales and manic depression, and her fifth, Love in Idleness, updates Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, setting the story in a holiday villa near Cortona, Italy.
Her sixth novel, Hearts and Minds, concerned with the lives of legal and illegal immigrants in London, was longlisted for the 2009 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
[20] Her eighth novel, The Golden Rule, was published in 2020 and was described as a "wry comedy-cum-thriller reimagining of Patricia Highsmith Strangers on a Train and Beauty and the Beast",[21] "offering comfort and wit, compassion and philosophical speculation,"[22] although one critic commented of the millennial protagonist: "Craig’s language choices... make her seem weirdly prim.
[26] Craig is interested in fairytales and children's fiction, and was one of the first critics to praise J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Cressida Cowell, Stephenie Meyer, Anthony Horowitz, Malorie Blackman and Suzanne Collins.
In 2017 she contributed the short story "Metamorphosis 2" about a celebrity inspired by Katie Hopkins who transforms into a gigantic cockroach to the anthology A Country of Refuge supporting refugees.
She has written forewords for the 2021 Abacus reissues of 5 novels by Beryl Bainbridge - Every Man For Himself, Master Georgie, The Birthday Boys, According to Queenie and The Bottle Factory Outing, 2 novels by Eva Ibbotson - The Secret Countess and A Glove Shop In Vienna, reissued by Macmillan - plus Alison Lurie's Pulitzer Prize-winning Foreign Affairs.