Joanna Cannon

Joanna Cannon is a British author and former psychiatrist whose novels and memoir explore mental health, memory, and the quiet dramas of community life with warmth, humour, and clinical insight. She studied Medicine and practised as a psychiatrist in the NHS before turning to writing. Cannon's debut novel The Trouble with Goats and Sheep was a Sunday Times bestseller about two girls investigating a neighbour's disappearance on a 1976 housing estate. Three Things About Elsie follows eighty-four-year-old Florence, who has fallen in her flat and lies waiting for help, reflecting on her life and the mystery of her friend Elsie, who may or may not exist. Her memoir Breaking & Mending chronicles her years as a junior doctor. Her fiction is characterised by its compassion for vulnerable people, its gentle humour, and its understanding that the most interesting mysteries are often the ones hiding in plain sight. Her audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers warm, insightful fiction about memory, ageing, and the communities we build — stories told with a psychiatrist's understanding of the human mind and a novelist's gift for character.