Her debut novel, The Undertaking, was nominated for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2014.
[7] The novel is set in World War II-era Germany and "tells the story of Peter Faber, a German soldier fighting on the Eastern front, who marries Katharina Spinell, a woman he has never met, in order to escape the horrors of the battlefield for a few days.
"[7] She wrote The Undertaking with the goal of trying to understand "what it was like to have been an ordinary German during the Second World War.
[3] A review of the novel in The New York Times said: "To write a story that doesn't allow for much sympathy, that keeps readers at a remove from the central characters, is one of the greatest challenges an author can undertake.
[8] Her novel The Colony – which "follows two outsiders who travel to a small island off the west coast of Ireland in search of answers"[9] – was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.