[6][7] Night Street was proposed for study by the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA) from 2014 to 2016.
[8][9][10] In 2012, Thornell was named one of The Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelists.
[11] Her second novel, On the Blue Train, published by Allen & Unwin in 2016 and inspired by the "disappearance" of Agatha Christie, was described by Kate Evans of ABC Radio National as "an elegant, literary novel about Teresa Neele, the woman Christie claimed to be when she disappeared, and the imagined people she met in this not-quite-sanctuary".
[12] In 2017, Thornell was awarded an Australia Council for the Arts International Residency[13] in Rome.
Her third novel, The Sirens Sing, was published by Fourth Estate Australia in 2022.