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Some call themselves McFans, others Freida readahs. However Freida McFadden’s loyal fans choose to define themselves, what we know for sure is that their numbers are growing, and fast.
McFadden, the author behind blockbuster psychological thriller The Housemaid, was the UK’s bestselling novelist of 2025, outstripping Richard Osman, Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros, and shifting 2.6m print copies in 12 months.
Last week, she had six novels in the the Top 10 UK paperback fiction bestseller chart. Estimates of her global sales, including audio and ebook formats, sit at 36m.
And earlier this month, McFadden finally unveiled her real name – Sara Cohen. Self-publishing her first book in 2013, she opted for a pseudonym to keep her writing life separate from her job as a doctor specialising in brain disorders in Boston, Massachusetts. “Freida” is inspired by the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database, a registry of medical placements.
“I’m tired of people debating if I’m a real person or if I’m three men,” she said after revealing her identity. Last week, she also shared the first image of herself without her signature wig.
Since McFadden’s debut, she has published 26 further novels, written while holding down her day job and raising two children – though in late 2023, she did step back from hospital duties, and now only works occasionally.
What’s behind her phenomenal success? The prolific rate is part of her appeal. That she publishes multiple books a year means readers “don’t have to wait too long before the next one”, says Philip Stone of NielsenIQ BookData. There is a “consistent momentum”.
McFadden’s major mainstream hit came with The Housemaid, her dark and ultra-twisty 2022 book about a young maid working for a wealthy couple. A film adaptation, starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, was released in December, grossing $400m worldwide. Adaptations “attract a whole new audience to her work”, says John Webb, fiction buyer at TGJones (formerly WH Smith). With multiple further screen versions planned, “we suspect her popularity will only increase,” he adds.
Domestic thrillers such as McFadden’s have been “very, very popular” over the years, says Stone – just look at Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train. “[Novels] hinged on the idea that the people closest to us could be the most dangerous are very enticing to readers,” he adds. There is also a “cultural fascination with stories involving secrets, and lies and moral ambiguity”.
McFadden’s concepts are “always wildly intriguing and deliciously dark”, with characters ranging from “serial killer parents to untrustworthy prison staff to a housemaid with a secret past” according to Bookouture, the publisher that persuaded McFadden to sell The Housemaid through a traditional route, after her decade-long run of self-publishing.
Many put her success down to her style. “It’s accessible storytelling, with plenty of narrative hooks and plot twists, told in straightforward prose and short chapters – something McFadden shares with James Patterson,” says Laura Wilson, Guardian thriller critic and author of crime novels including the DI Stratton series. “So it doesn’t add much to the reader’s cognitive load, and we can care about the outcome without becoming too emotionally invested.”
Reveals happen “in almost every single chapter”, adds Bookouture. “The pace never lets up, and there’s always a burning question to be answered,” with many chapters left on cliffhangers – something Stone describes as “popcorn fiction”. And the massive back catalogue offers readers a “comfort zone”, says Wilson: “we like it, we want more of it, we know what we’re going to get”. McFadden is seen as something of a successor to Patterson, offering an alternative to his police procedurals, as well as male-centered thrillers by the likes of Lee Child. Indeed, 82% of her readers are women, according to NielsenIQ BookData. More surprising is that her fanbase skews young – her readers are “mainly in the 24 to 34 age bracket”, says Stone. Part of this is surely down to her popularity on BookTok, where fans share reviews and guides to her work. Twenty-four-year-old Rhianah from Leicestershire – who posts book content under the username rhislibraryx, including a ranking of all of McFadden’s thrillers – tells me that “if anyone expresses that they feel in a reading slump”, her first recommendation is “just read a Freida”.
That BookTok “crosses borders”, says Stone, means the buzz has spread beyond the US and UK – in France, for example, four of the five top-selling books last year were McFadden thrillers.
The books are not literary masterpieces. But they are not pretending to be, either – “I’m not trying to write War and Peace,” McFadden told the New York Times in 2024.
“I love McFadden”, wrote one fan on a thriller subreddit last year – “not because her books are any good, but because they’re so far-fetched and awful, they’re absolutely trashy fun.” In Rhianah’s ranking video, she says that the plot twist of her least favourite, The Locked Door, was “terrible”.
And McFadden listens to her readers. After they criticised the confusing ending of her 2019 novel The Ex, she changed it, leading to a boost in its Goodreads score.
McFadden grew up in midtown Manhattan. While she began writing stories aged nine, she ended up pursuing maths at Harvard before specialising in medicine. Writing became an escape from the day job, and her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, drew on her experiences as a medical intern.
While she credits Daphne du Maurier and Charlotte Brontë as inspiration – “Rebecca and Jane Eyre were the original domestic thrillers,” she told the Times – her contemporary favourites include Verity by Colleen Hoover, Room by Emma Donoghue, and The Green Mile by Stephen King. McFadden, now 45, lives in Boston with her husband and children. She’s published one book this year already, Dear Debbie, with two more, The Divorce and The Witch, slated for May and October.
Though she has now revealed her real name, she says will continue to write under the McFadden pen name. “For now, I will go back to making myself scarce and writing more plot twists – the fictional kind.”
