Born in Johannesburg, she moved to New Zealand in 1989 where she completed her medical degree and went on to work as a general practitioner until becoming a full time writer in 2003.
[1] Her father worked as a publisher at Heinemann; she began writing at an early age but chose to study medicine after his death from stomach cancer.
In 2012 she won the Graeme Lay Short Story Competition with "The Gift" and was runner-up in the Royal College of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Creative Science Writing with "Black Toes".
[1] The Otago Daily Times called it a "a hard-hitting, emotion-packed novel featuring injustice and racial prejudice",[7] and included it on a list of the best books of 2016.
[10] Sussman has noted that The Doctor's Wife is her first novel to include a medical background, and said "it was quite fun and satisfying to tie together my two disparate professions".