Torey Hayden books

Non-Fiction

Picture Reading Order

Sheila Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Torey Hayden was born on May 21, 1951, in Livingston, Montana. She earned her B.A. from Whitman College, her M.S. from Eastern Montana College, and did doctoral study at the University of Minnesota. She worked as a special education teacher and child psychologist, specializing in elective mutism (now called selective mutism), and her experiences in the classroom became the basis for her best-known books. In 1980, she moved to Wales and has spent most of her adult life in Great Britain.

Her first book, One Child (1980), tells the true story of Sheila, a six-year-old girl who had been horrifically abused and placed in Hayden’s class after attacking and burning a younger child. The book became an international bestseller, was translated into 27 languages, and was later adapted as an interactive opera. Its sequel, The Tiger’s Child (1995), picks up the story seven years later when Hayden reconnects with a teenage Sheila. Her other non-fiction memoirs, including Somebody Else’s Kids, Ghost Girl, Beautiful Child, and Twilight Children, each focus on different children she worked with and the conditions they faced, from autism and Tourette syndrome to sexual abuse and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Hayden has also written four fiction novels, starting with The Sunflower Forest (1984), inspired by a newspaper article she read in Wales about a woman who had been part of the Nazi Lebensborn program. More recently, she co-authored the Ziji picture books with Tibetan meditation master Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, teaching children basic meditation through the adventures of a bouncy puppy.