Diane Chamberlain

Diane Chamberlain is an American novelist, a former clinical social worker and psychotherapist, who writes family dramas and suspense, including The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes (2006) and Necessary Lies (2013). Her books have appeared in more than twenty languages.

Chamberlain was born in Plainfield, New Jersey. She took bachelor's and master's degrees in clinical social work at San Diego State University, worked in hospitals in San Diego and Washington, D.C., and later ran a private psychotherapy practice for adolescents in Alexandria, Virginia. She now lives in North Carolina.

She wrote her first novel, Private Relations, while working as a hospital social worker. Berkley Books published it in 1989, and it won the Romance Writers of America RITA Award for single-title contemporary romance. HarperCollins reissued it in 1996, and she brought out a revised 25th anniversary edition in 2014. Her later novels include The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes (2006), Necessary Lies (2013), The Silent Sister (2014), Big Lies in a Small Town (2020) and The Last House on the Street (2021). Her books have reached the USA Today and Sunday Times bestseller lists, and Pan Macmillan publishes her in Britain.

For collectors

Her debut, the 1989 Berkley edition of Private Relations, is the earliest item and the one with an award behind it. The 1996 HarperCollins reissue and the revised 2014 edition, which adds an epilogue and changes some characters' dialogue, are different texts from the original.