After the birth of her two children at the age of 26, she started to write but lived on a diet of rejections until she was finally encouraged by Angela Carter who tutored a writing course she attended. Her first novel Union Street was published by Virago in 1982, when she was 39. A second, Blow Your House Down, was published by Virago in 1984 and was later adapted for the stage. This was followed by The Century's Daughter (1986) and The Man Who Wasn't There (1989).

Regeneration was published by Viking in 1991 to critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. It was nominated by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year -the only novel by a British author to be so distinguished. The book emerged as the first part of what became a trilogy focusing on the First World War, and centred on the real-life relationship between the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the army psychologist William Rivers, who was charged with the task of persuading Sassoon to withdraw his bitter anti-war diatribes and to return to the front.

The Eye of The Door, the second book in the trilogy appeared in 1993 and the final book, The Ghost Road, was published to critical acclaim in 1995 and won the Booker Prize.