Daughters Of War Books in Order

The Daughters Of War series follows the Baudin women across three generations, from occupied France to sun‑bleached Malta and the heat of 1960s Morocco.

Each novel stands alone, but together they trace how war, exile and family secrets echo down the years. Dinah Jefferies uses each setting not just as scenery but as a way to explore class, occupation and the narrow roles open to women at the time.

The story begins in Daughters of War, set in 1944 in a village in the Dordogne. Three sisters share a stone cottage on the edge of the woods: Hélène, the steady nurse trying to keep everyone safe; Elise, who runs a café that doubles as a hub for Resistance work; and Florence, the youngest, who tends the garden and dreams of peace. As the Nazi occupation tightens, the sisters are pushed into harder choices — sheltering Allied fighters, hiding secrets from neighbours who may or may not be trustworthy, and reckoning with the complicated truth about their own Anglo‑French family.

Those choices have consequences. Acts of courage come with real cost, and the damage and guilt of that final year of war shape the rest of the trilogy. The books are as much about the aftermath of conflict as the fighting itself: trauma, divided loyalties and what it means to try to build a life on scarred ground.

In The Hidden Palace the focus widens into a dual‑timeline story. Rosalie Delacroix flees Paris in the 1920s for the clubs and backstreets of Malta, reinventing herself on an island where strangers can buy new names. Two decades later, Florence Baudin arrives in wartime Malta at her estranged mother’s request, trying to track down the aunt who disappeared years earlier. The search uncovers layers of reinvention, shame and loyalty, all set against honey‑coloured stone walls and bomb‑damaged harbours.

Night Train to Marrakech carries the series into the 1960s and a new generation. French student Vicky Baudin travels to Morocco to meet the grandmother who once gave up her baby for adoption, hoping for answers as much as adventure. As her cousin Bea vanishes and danger closes in, Vicky is drawn into a glittering yet precarious world of fashion, parties and political unrest, and has to rely on a grandmother who has every reason to keep her past locked away.

Across all three books you can expect strong, flawed women, moral grey areas and a steady pull between duty and desire. The tone balances suspense and romance with the everyday texture of kitchens, cafés and family quarrels, all framed by richly described landscapes. Reading the trilogy in order lets you watch secrets surface and loyalties shift as the Baudin family keeps trying — and failing, and trying again — to make a home in a world reshaped by war.