Carol Drinkwater Books in Order
Browse Carol Drinkwater books in order, with Olive series guides, standalone summaries, My Story titles, and simple advice on where to start reading.
Last updated: June 9, 2026
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Publication Order
30 books
The Haunted School
by Carol Drinkwater
1985
Fanny Crowe sails to colonial Australia to take up a teaching post in a rough goldfields town. The school is said to be haunted, and she must win over frightened locals while uncovering the truth behind the rumours.
An Abundance of Rain
by Carol Drinkwater
1989
Kate De Marly leaves England for a Fijian island to meet the father who abandoned her, only to learn he is dead. Left his plantation, she finds herself in a tropical mystery shaped by secrets, greed, and an approaching cyclone.
Akin to Love
by Carol Drinkwater
1991
Film star Penny Morrison returns to Crete to shoot a screenplay drawn from a youthful love affair. The island's beauty, old political shadows, and a buried memory force her to face what she has tried not to remember.
Mapping the Heart
by Carol Drinkwater
1993
Married actress Eleanor seems to have a glittering life on the French Riviera until she falls for a younger man. Their flight to Brazil turns a reckless love affair into a dangerous test of desire, freedom, and self-deception.
Molly
by Carol Drinkwater
1996
Molly's world is shaken when she learns her parents are divorcing. Hurt and confused, she runs away from school and plunges into a chain of adventures that are far riskier than she expects.
Molly on the Run
by Carol Drinkwater
1996
Molly and her friend Daniella run away to Poland, hoping for freedom and excitement. Instead they find themselves caught up with a sinister gang, where every wrong turn makes getting home harder.
Crossing the Line
by Carol Drinkwater
2000
This nonfiction collection brings together the voices of young women who have ended up in trouble with the law. It looks at what led them there, what prison or punishment felt like, and what came after.
Because You're Mine
by Carol Drinkwater
2001
On the day Lyndsay's marriage falls apart, her teenage son vanishes with another local boy. As the search deepens, old lies and buried wounds rise to the surface, turning a family crisis into something far darker.
The Hunger
by Carol Drinkwater
2001
In Ireland in 1845, Phyllis McCormack watches the potato blight destroy her family's chances of survival. As hunger deepens, she sets out to find her rebel brother and is drawn into a wider fight for justice.
The Olive Farm
by Carol Drinkwater
2001
Carol Drinkwater and Michel Noll fall in love with a run-down olive farm in Provence and decide to make a life there. This memoir mixes romance, money worries, hard labour, and the simple thrill of harvesting their own olives.
Twentieth Century Girl
by Carol Drinkwater
2001
Flora Bonnington lives in a world that expects her to stay quiet, decorative, and obedient. She wants the vote, an education, and a future shaped by new ideas, even if that means defying the father she loves.
Suffragette
by Carol Drinkwater
2003
In 1909, Dollie Baxter is swept into the campaign for Votes for Women and marches beside real suffragette leaders. As the movement turns harsher and prison looms, she must decide how much she is ready to risk.
The Olive Season
by Carol Drinkwater
2003
Life at Appassionata grows more demanding as Carol faces pregnancy, farm work, and fresh problems with water and labour. This second memoir keeps the romance of Provence but never loses sight of how hard the dream can be.
A Celebration of Olives
by Carol Drinkwater
2004
This volume brings together *The Olive Farm* and *The Olive Season*, tracing Carol Drinkwater and Michel Noll's early years restoring Appassionata in Provence. It captures the romance, hard labour, and everyday surprises behind their olive-growing dream.
The Olive Harvest
by Carol Drinkwater
2004
Back at the farm after time away, Carol and Michel hope for a quieter season. Instead, a shocking blow leaves Carol facing grief, uncertainty, and the question of how to keep going in a landscape she still loves.
The Illustrated Olive Farm
by Carol Drinkwater
2005
This richly illustrated companion returns to life at Appassionata, from olive pressing and harvest worries to animals, neighbours, and Provençal routines. It is a more visual, reflective look at the world behind the memoir trilogy.
The Olive Route
by Carol Drinkwater
2006
Drinkwater leaves her farm to follow the olive's path around the Mediterranean. Part travel book and part personal quest, it explores the tree's history, the people who cultivate it, and the cultures built around it.
The Olive Tree
by Carol Drinkwater
2008
Troubled by changes on her own farm, Drinkwater travels through Spain, Morocco, Algeria, and Italy in search of the olive tree's deeper story. The result is a mix of travel, history, and concern for the future of traditional farming.
Cadogan Square
by Carol Drinkwater
2010
This collection brings together two linked stories of Edwardian London across fifteen years. Through Flora and Dollie, it follows changing ideas about class, education, and women's rights as a new century begins.
Return to the Olive Farm
by Carol Drinkwater
2010
After months of Mediterranean travel, Carol returns home to Provence expecting a joyful reunion. Instead she finds fresh troubles on the farm, including the alarming decline of the bees that help hold the whole landscape together.
Nowhere to Run
by Carol Drinkwater
2012
Becky Mortkowicz flees Poland with her Jewish family and reaches France just as war closes in again. As danger spreads across occupied Europe, friendship, exile, and the struggle to stay hidden shape her fight to survive.
The Girl in Room Fourteen
by Carol Drinkwater
2013
In Cannes, lemon seller Cecile Berri guards a secret tied to a long-ago love affair and her yearly stay in room fourteen. As past and present draw together, this sunlit novella asks what love can cost over time.
Hotel Paradise
by Carol Drinkwater
2014
Songwriter Genevieve Bowles returns to the French Riviera and an island hotel bound up with her past. As memories of youthful ambition and first love resurface, the beauty of Hotel Paradise gives way to menace and old danger.
The Only Girl in the World
by Carol Drinkwater
2014
During the First World War, English soldier Dennis meets Hélène while on leave in France, and the two fall hard and fast. Their love has to survive distance, uncertainty, and the constant threat of the trenches.
A Simple Act of Kindness
by Carol Drinkwater
2015
After a devastating car accident, Carole flees an oppressive marriage and tries to start again in rural France. A local farmer offers hope, but the husband she escaped is already trying to find her.
The Forgotten Summer
by Carol Drinkwater
2016
When disaster ruins the annual harvest at a Provençal vineyard, blame falls on Jane, the English daughter-in-law. As she takes charge, she begins uncovering painful family secrets that may change everything she thought she knew.
The Lost Girl
by Carol Drinkwater
2017
Kurtiz Ross rushes to Paris after a possible sighting of the daughter who vanished years earlier. On a night of terror and confusion, another woman's story of love and loss in postwar Provence begins to change her search.
The Love of a Stranger
by Carol Drinkwater
2017
Grieving after the death of her partner, Susan moves to Cannes hoping for a fresh start. There she meets Gustave, a stranger with losses of his own, and must decide whether life can open up again.
The House on the Edge of the Cliff
by Carol Drinkwater
2019
Grace has built a quiet life in a clifftop villa in Provence, far from one terrible summer in her youth. Then a stranger arrives who knows exactly what happened, and the past starts closing in.
An Act of Love
by Carol Drinkwater
2022
Forced to flee wartime Poland, Sara and her parents hide in the French Alps and find brief safety there. But as the Nazis close in, love, resistance, and survival become impossible to separate.
Where should I start?
If you want the books most readers start with: The Olive Farm → The Olive Season → The Olive Harvest
If you want sun-drenched family drama and suspense: The Forgotten Summer → The Lost Girl → The House on the Edge of the Cliff
If you want historical stories for younger readers: The Hunger → Suffragette → Twentieth Century Girl
If you want a short first taste: The Girl in Room Fourteen → Hotel Paradise → A Simple Act of Kindness
Author bio
Carol Drinkwater was born in London in 1948 and grew up between England and Ireland, spending part of her childhood on her grandparents' farm in County Laois. That back-and-forth life, city and country, England and Ireland, seems to have stayed with her.
As an actress, she built a long screen and stage career before many readers knew her as an author. She became especially familiar to television audiences as Helen Herriot in the original BBC adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small, and later won a Critics' Circle award for her role in the film Father.
Writing had been there from the start.
She remembers getting a piece into a girls' magazine when she was about ten or eleven, then filling notebooks with diaries, words, and scraps of observation. Acting was the public career, but writing kept running alongside it, quietly and stubbornly.
Years later, while working in Australia, she wrote The Haunted School, a historical children's story about a young teacher in colonial Australia. The book was adapted for television, and that period helped set up the next chapter of her life, both professionally and personally.
Then France changed everything.
Drinkwater and her husband, television producer Michel Noll, bought an abandoned olive farm in Provence and slowly brought it back to life. That experience fed the books many readers know first: The Olive Farm, The Olive Season, The Olive Harvest, and later Return to the Olive Farm. In those memoirs she writes about love, money worries, pruning, water shortages, neighbours, animals, and the stubborn day-to-day work of making a home from rough ground.
She later widened the frame in The Olive Route and The Olive Tree, travelling around the Mediterranean to follow the history, culture, and politics tied to olive growing. The project did not stay on the page. It also inspired documentary films, and her work around olive heritage has included involvement with plans for an Olive Heritage Trail around the Mediterranean.
Her fiction often carries that same pull of place. Books such as The Forgotten Summer, The Lost Girl, The House on the Edge of the Cliff, and An Act of Love move through Provence, Paris, the French coast, and wartime France, mixing family secrets, old grief, romance, and the long afterlife of history. Even when the plots turn tense, there is usually a strong sense of landscape, food, memory, and people trying to rebuild after loss.
She has also written for younger readers. The two Molly books follow a headstrong teenager in trouble, while her contributions to the My Story line, including The Hunger, Suffragette, Twentieth Century Girl, and Nowhere to Run, bring large historical events down to the level of one young life at a time. That mix of adult fiction, memoir, travel writing, and children's historical stories makes her bibliography feel wider than people sometimes expect.
Now based in France, Drinkwater still writes from the landscape that reshaped her second career. Some readers come to her for the olive books, others for the suspenseful standalones, others for the historical titles, but many stay for the same reason: she is very good at making a setting feel lived in, and at showing how love, loss, and work keep pressing on ordinary days.
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