Early novels Her debut novel,
In a Fishbone Church, was published in 1998 and was widely praised in New Zealand and overseas, winning the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book of Fiction at the
New Zealand Book Awards in 1998. The writer
Nick Hornby said "Catherine Chidgey is a wonderful new talent, and
In a Fishbone Church marks the beginning of what promises to be a glorious literary career".
Louis de Bernières called the novel "warm, subtle and evocative. You will be thinking about it long after you have finished reading". The
Sunday Express called it "a wonderful, gripping read. Human relations and needs are explored in all their complexity. Chidgey proves herself to be among that elite group of authors who possess a true grasp of the patterns of life".
The Independent on Sunday said the novel "ensnares you, creeps up and snaffles you with its small, tense concerns. I could not stop thinking about it. I could not put it down ... I finished
Golden Deeds with that delicious and rare feeling: that I was in the presence of a proper, grown-up storyteller who cared not a toss for gimmicks or manifestoes, but dared instead to put her case with real authorial power and verve".
The Transformation, Chidgey's third novel, was published in 2003, and that year she was named New Zealand's best novelist under forty by
The New Zealand Listener. The book tells the story of a shadowy Parisian wig-maker who flees to Tampa, Florida in the 1890s.
The Sunday Times said that "Chidgey spins a horror story which, miraculously avoiding easy
sensationalism, is both troubling and haunting", and the
New Zealand Herald said it was "her third and best so far ... Chidgey could tackle any subject and produce something wonderful from it. She has that gift of the imagination that finds metaphor, contiguity and paradox wherever she looks, and a seemingly innate feel for structuring events, times and historical detail to make one whole, satisfying narrative out of a myriad unexpected parts".
The Sunday Express remarked, "This really is a novel to get lost in ... A highly original read, as beautiful as it is terrifying, which manages to be riotously chilling without ever going over the top".
Later novels Chidgey's fourth novel,
The Wish Child, set in Nazi Germany, was published in New Zealand in 2016 and was a bestseller, winning the 2017 Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards—the country's richest literary prize. Her fifth book was released in November 2017. A '
found' novel,
The Beat of the Pendulum was written during 2016, with Chidgey drawing on newspaper articles, Facebook posts, emails, radio broadcasts, books, street signs and conversations to create an entry for every day of the year. Radio New Zealand selected it as a Best Book of 2017, calling it "Important in terms of its form as much as its content ... sensationally clever writing ... an enormously skilled writer who totally gets the craft". It was longlisted for the
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was published in the UK by Lightning Books in 2019. Chidgey's sixth book,
Remote Sympathy, was published in 2020, and like
The Wish Child is set in Nazi Germany. It was shortlisted for the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. It was a
Sunday Times Book of the Month, and was described by
The Guardian as "immersive, profound and beautifully plotted".
Publishers Weekly praised Chidgey's exploration of the intersecting stories of former Nazis and Holocaust survivors, concluding: "With its multiple registers and complex view of humanity, this marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature". It was one of New Zealand's top ten best-selling novels in 2021, was shortlisted for the 2022
International Dublin Literary Award, and was longlisted for the 2022
Women's Prize for Fiction. In 2022 it was named by
The Guardian as one of the best books of the year. In October 2022, her seventh novel, ''The Axeman's Carnival'', was published. Set in
Central Otago, the novel tells the story of the relationship of a farming couple and is narrated by a magpie called Tama. Chidgey drew from her husband's family's farming experiences in writing the novel.
Rachael King, reviewing the book for
Newsroom, described it as "remarkable, brilliant, a classic in the making", with Tama's voice providing "dark poetry, dramatic irony, startling wisdom and trickster delights". and won New Zealand's top book award, the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2023, her eighth novel,
Pet, a thriller about the relationship between a 12-year-old girl and her schoolteacher, was published in New Zealand, the UK and the United States.
Ruth Franklin in
The New York Times called it a "lingering, haunting book", and "a landmark in the small but potent canon of contemporary novels about unusual girls reckoning with themselves and the world around them". It was the fifth best-selling fiction book in New Zealand in 2023. Her ninth novel,
The Book of Guilt, was published in 2025. Set in an alternative dystopian version of 1970s England, the novel is primarily narrated by one of three identical triplets raised in a children's home.
Claire Mabey in
The Spinoff described the novel as asking the reader to question "what it means to be alive in a human body that can learn, dream and think for itself", while grappling with contemporary political themes of dehumanisation and morality.
The Guardian described it as a "compulsively readable story that raises profound questions", although noted that it would inevitably be compared to
Never Let Me Go by
Kazuo Ishiguro. It was selected as one of the top books of 2025 by
Amazon and
People magazine. ==Other works==