Chocolate Girls Books in Order

The Chocolate Girls books follow several generations of families whose lives are tied to Cadbury's famous factory at Bournville in Birmingham. Beginning on the eve of the Second World War and stretching into the 1960s and beyond, the series blends factory life, family drama and the long shadow of war into one continuous story.

It starts in Chocolate Girls, where three very different young women, Edie, Ruby and Janet, work side by side on the chocolate lines. Edie has married in haste to escape an unhappy home and is widowed at nineteen; a bombed-out infant placed in her arms during the Blitz becomes the child she never expected to raise. Ruby, keen not to be left behind while friends marry, settles for safe but limited Frank, while kind-hearted Janet is painfully burned by an affair with a married man. Their friendship, and their shared love for the little boy David, holds them together through rationing, grief and constant uncertainty.

The Bells of Bournville Green moves the focus forward to the early 1960s, following pretty seventeen-year-old Greta, Ruby's daughter, who is happiest among her friends and admirers on the factory floor. Home is far less secure, with no father in sight and a mother whose latest boyfriend makes life miserable. When Greta's glamorous, unreliable sister Marleen blows back into their lives during the bitter winter of 1962, a chain of choices leaves Greta pregnant, homeless and desperate. She is taken in by Edie and Anatoli Gruschov, old friends of her mother, and for a time finds the family warmth she has always missed. But even that sanctuary cannot escape tragedy, which ripples out through the original "chocolate girls" and their children.

Later novels return to an earlier generation and deepen the family story. In Secrets of the Chocolate Girls, it is 1940 and Ann Gilby, once a worker on the Cadbury line, is now keeping house while her husband and daughter are at the factory nearby. Bombs fall ever closer to their Birmingham home, and the return of her married daughter with a baby lays fresh pressures on the household. Underneath it all sits a secret Ann has carried since the previous war, a truth that could split her family apart if it ever comes fully into the light.

Wartime for the Chocolate Girls continues Ann's story into 1941. After surviving a bomb blast while serving with the Women's Voluntary Service, she is forced to re-evaluate her priorities. Her daughters look toward the future, one engaged to a soldier while working munitions at the factory, the other back at home, yet Ann's marriage is strained by her husband's infidelity and the existence of another child. When his other woman, Marianne, arrives on the doorstep with troubles of her own, old loyalties and buried truths collide.

Across the books you see Bournville itself change, from a tightly run wartime workplace to a symbol of stability in a battered city. Families fracture and reform, children grow up under air raids and then in the more hopeful 1950s, and the original women of the factory gradually give way to daughters and sons. The tone is warm but never sentimental, showing both the comfort of chocolate bars and canteen gossip and the cost of loss, secrets and social change.

Although each novel focuses on a different central character, they are closely linked, with recurring names and long-running questions about love, belonging and identity. Readers who follow the sequence in order get the pleasure of seeing side characters step forward and old mysteries slowly resolved, but each book still works as a self-contained Birmingham family saga set against the smell of cocoa and the rumble of factory machinery.