Camille Di Maio Books in Order

Camille Di Maio came to fiction after an award-winning career in real estate in San Antonio. She eventually left that work to write full time, bringing a practical eye for place, people, and the choices that can quietly reshape a life.

She studied political science in college and found campaign work more fun than the classroom side of it.

Then she turned that curiosity about people into novels.

Di Maio writes historical fiction that stays close to the personal stakes inside big moments. Her stories often follow women who are boxed in by class, family expectations, war, marriage, or the limits of their era, then have to decide what kind of life they want to claim. Romance matters, but friendship, family loyalty, and the cost of keeping secrets matter just as much.

Her debut, The Memory of Us, begins in prewar Liverpool, where Julianne Westcott discovers the brother her family has kept hidden and falls for a groundskeeper studying for the priesthood. The novel follows her through the Blitz and into the long shadow of a choice made to protect the people she loves. It shows the mix readers can expect from Di Maio, period detail, emotional pressure, and characters trying to be honest when honesty could upend everything.

With The First Emma, she drew on the life of Emma Koehler, who took charge of a brewing empire during Prohibition after the murder of her husband. The book moves through love, work, women’s independence, and the strange turns that can make an unlikely person the one holding everything together. Di Maio is especially interested in those turning points, when a character has no easy answer but still has to act.

The Beautiful Strangers heads to 1958 Southern California and the Hotel del Coronado during the filming of Some Like It Hot. A young woman searching for the meaning behind her grandfather’s cryptic request finds romance, a new direction, and an old hotel mystery. The setting is glamorous, but the heart of the story is still a woman deciding whether she can step beyond the life others have planned for her.

Her later work keeps changing the backdrop without losing that human focus. Until We Meet follows three friends in wartime New York, while Come Fly with Me sends two women into the fast-moving Pan Am world of 1962. Readers who enjoy friendship-centered historical fiction will find plenty of it here, along with women making room for freedom, love, and work on their own terms.

The past is important in these books, but it never feels like a museum display.

Di Maio has lived in Texas, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and California, and she has also spent significant time in Hawai'i and Maine. She has traveled to four continents, and that appetite for new places shows up in fiction that moves from Liverpool to New York, Texas, California, and far beyond.

Away from the desk, she has shared that she enjoys farmers markets, Broadway tunes, and adventures that do not involve heights or roller skates. She and her husband have raised four children. Her books have earned honors including the Beverly Hills Book Award and the Golden Quill, but the simple draw is the same from one novel to the next: history with people at the center of it.