Belinda Jones Books in Order

If you want her classic travel romcoms: Divas Las Vegas → I Love Capri → The California Club
If you want cozy food, friendship, and a road trip: Winter Wonderland → The Traveling Tea Shop
If you want bigger emotional drama and vivid destinations: Out Of The Blue/Summer in Greece → Living la Vida Loca/Dancing Girls → California Dreamers
If you want memoir instead of fiction: On The Road To Mr Right → Bodie on the Road
If you want a touch of magic: The Hotel Where We Met

Belinda Jones was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on 20 December 1967, and spent her childhood between Oxfordshire and Devon before moving to London at 19 to study journalism at the London College of Printing. Reading came early, and so did a taste for adventure. Both stayed with her.

Her first paid job was on the children's comic Postman Pat, which is a pretty memorable way to begin a writing life. From there she moved into magazine journalism, working on titles including Woman's World and more!, then freelancing for magazines such as Elle, Empire and Cosmopolitan. She learned how to write quickly, clearly, and with a sharp eye for the telling detail.

Travel was the spark.

Work took her farther afield, especially to the United States, and California became a turning point. She had wanted to write a road trip book in the mold of a comic travel memoir, but publishers pushed her toward fiction instead. A friend's advice to write from experience helped her turn real-life adventures into Divas Las Vegas, the novel that launched her long run of travel-hungry romantic comedies.

Books like I Love Capri, The California Club, The Love Academy, Winter Wonderland and The Traveling Tea Shop followed. Readers came to her books for sunshine, movement, warmth, and women who felt recognisably human even in glamorous settings. Her heroines are often funny, self-questioning, a little bruised, and standing at the edge of some big decision about love, friendship, work, or home.

Place mattered just as much as plot.

Capri, Tahiti, Costa Rica, Venice, Crete, Quebec and New England are not just backdrops in her fiction. She liked to build a story through the food, weather, rituals and small surprises of a place, so the destination became part of the emotional journey. That is a big part of why her books feel like holidays with a heart, they offer escape, but they also ask what happens when travel shakes a person loose from the life she has been settling for.

She also wrote more directly from life. On The Road To Mr Right turned an American search for love into a funny, self-aware memoir, and Bodie on the Road grew from her bond with a rescue dog and a long drive up the Pacific coast. Later she spent time working with animal rescue in Rhode Island, and under the name Molly James she moved into romance with a touch of magic.

She lived for long stretches in California and stayed deeply connected to other writers too, helping to co-found Notting Hill Press with fellow novelists Michele Gorman and Talli Roland. People who worked with her remembered the same warmth and enthusiasm that readers found in the books. Even off the page, she seems to have been someone who liked opening doors.

Jones visited more than twenty-five countries and kept finding new ways to turn movement into story. She died on 1 December 2024 after a short battle with cancer. Her final novel, The Hotel Where We Met, was later published posthumously, which feels sadly fitting for a writer so interested in timing, missed chances and the strange luck of meeting the right person in the right place.