[9] Chidgey has explained that the 13-year gap between her third and fourth novels was due to infertility issues keeping her from writing; she and her husband finally had their daughter in 2015.

The writer Nick Hornby said "Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent, and In a Fishbone Church marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career".

I finished Golden Deeds with that delicious and rare feeling: that I was in the presence of a proper, grown-up storyteller who cared not a toss for gimmicks or manifestoes, but dared instead to put her case with real authorial power and verve".

She has that gift of the imagination that finds metaphor, contiguity and paradox wherever she looks, and a seemingly innate feel for structuring events, times and historical detail to make one whole, satisfying narrative out of a myriad unexpected parts".

[17] The Sunday Express remarked, "This really is a novel to get lost in ... A highly original read, as beautiful as it is terrifying, which manages to be riotously chilling without ever going over the top".

I love the way, at this critical point in the world, when fundamental human values are violated, The Wish Child reminds us with grace and understated wisdom of a need to strive for universal good.

A 'found' novel, The Beat of the Pendulum was written during 2016, with Chidgey drawing on newspaper articles, Facebook posts, emails, radio broadcasts, books, street signs and conversations to create an entry for every day of the year.

[24] Radio New Zealand selected it as a Best Book of 2017, calling it "Important in terms of its form as much as its content ... sensationally clever writing ... an enormously skilled writer who totally gets the craft".

[32] It was one of New Zealand's top ten best-selling novels in 2021,[33] was shortlisted for the 2022 International Dublin Literary Award,[34] and was longlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction.

Set in Central Otago, the novel tells the story of the relationship of a farming couple and is narrated by a magpie called Tama.

[38] Rachael King, reviewing the book for Newsroom, described it as "remarkable, brilliant, a classic in the making", with Tama's voice providing "dark poetry, dramatic irony, startling wisdom and trickster delights".

[41][42][43] Ruth Franklin in The New York Times called it a "lingering, haunting book", and "a landmark in the small but potent canon of contemporary novels about unusual girls reckoning with themselves and the world around them".

In November 2019, OneTree House published her first original picture book, Jiffy, Cat Detective, illustrated by Astrid Matijasevich.