Debbie Rix Books in Order

Debbie Rix was born in Kent and went to school in Dulwich, south London. Her parents were architects, and she remembers a childhood shaped by make-believe, books, and an old oak beside a wartime bomb crater that she and her sister turned into a playhouse. Long before she wrote novels, she enjoyed building small worlds and making stories out of what was close at hand.

Her first career was in television. Rix began at the BBC behind the scenes, working her way through roles including secretary, production assistant, and researcher. She then became the first newsreader on BBC Breakfast Television when it launched, before presenting programmes ranging from entertainment to news and documentaries. Voice-over work ran alongside much of that busy period.

When she had young children, she moved behind the camera again and produced events for companies and charities. It was practical work with plenty of moving parts, a useful training ground for someone who would later manage big casts, shifting timelines, and detailed research on the page.

Stories had been there all along.

Rix finally turned that lifelong interest into novels in her fifties. Her first historical novel, The Girl with Emerald Eyes, was published in 2015, having originally appeared as Secrets of the Tower. It moves between modern Pisa and the twelfth century, using the mystery of the Leaning Tower's creation to connect a woman facing a difficult marriage with Berta di Bernardo, a woman whose ambitions do not fit neatly into her time.

Italy has remained central to much of her work. Daughters of the Silk Road follows a Venetian family and a Ming vase across centuries, while The Silk Weaver's Wife links a modern journalist's trip to Italy with the life of Anastasia, a young woman caught in an unhappy eighteenth-century marriage. In The Photograph, a family secret leads from the 1956 Hungarian uprising to Sardinia and the present day.

Later novels turn more often to the Second World War, especially the complicated lives of women living under pressure. The Secret Letter follows Imogen in Britain and Magda in Bavaria, drawing on letters and diaries from Rix's parents' wartime years. The Italian Girls brings together a resistance worker and a film star in occupied Italy. The German Wife and The German Mother look at ordinary family lives caught in the machinery of Nazi Germany.

She likes history for the people inside it, especially women whose choices are easy to overlook in the larger story. Her books often pair past and present, with letters, photographs, diaries, buildings, or objects carrying a secret forward. Romance, family loyalty, moral pressure, and the cost of keeping silent are recurring concerns.

Rix spends time in Italy and lives in the Kent countryside with her journalist husband, their children, chickens, and cats. Gardening, cooking, and welcoming friends around the table are also part of the life she has described.

It is a home life with plenty of room for stories.