Ella Carey Books in Order

If you want Paris secrets and dual timelines: Paris Time Capsule → The House by the Lake → From a Paris Balcony
If you want wartime New York: A New York Secret → The Lost Girl of Berlin → The Girl from Paris → The Lost Sister of Fifth Avenue
If you want Italy, villas, and family mysteries: An Italian Secret → The Venetian Daughter → The Tuscan Villa
If you want a tense Paris Resistance story: The Paris Maid
If you want strong standalone historical drama: Beyond the Horizon → Secret Shores → The Things We Don't Say

Ella Carey was born in Adelaide, Australia, and studied there at the University of Adelaide, completing degrees in music and arts. She trained in classical piano, and her studies also took in history and literature, which helps explain why her novels care as much about atmosphere and the past as they do about plot. French has been part of her life since childhood, and Europe, especially Paris, became an early fascination.

Paris stayed with her.

Carey has often described herself as a Francophile, and her fiction makes that easy to believe. She has travelled to France many times, and those visits helped shape the streets, apartments, cafes, and old buildings that readers find in her books. The city is rarely just scenery in her work. It is usually the place where buried lives begin to speak.

Writing was the long game. For years she wrote alongside work and family life, and some of her early work appeared in The Review of Australian Fiction. She has also spoken about teaching when she was younger, and about writing through the busy years of raising children. The big turning point came when she found the real story of a long-sealed Paris apartment and built a novel around it.

That novel was Paris Time Capsule.

Carey first published Paris Time Capsule independently in 2014, and it found a large audience before being republished more widely. From there, she built the Secrets of Paris books, including The House by the Lake and From a Paris Balcony, novels that mix family mystery, love, and the aftershocks of war. Her books have since reached readers well beyond Australia and been translated widely. These stories often move between past and present, with letters, paintings, keys, and old rooms doing a lot of the emotional work.

Her later fiction widened the map without losing the same interests. A New York Secret and The Girl from Paris bring food, fashion, ambition, and wartime loss into New York. Beyond the Horizon turns to the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, the female pilots of World War II, while Secret Shores heads back to Australia and the art world of the postwar years. In An Italian Secret and The Venetian Daughter, Italy becomes another place where beautiful settings sit beside hard moral choices.

A lot of Carey’s books are about women trying to make a life while history closes in. She returns again and again to hidden family stories, love under pressure, and the question of how much the past can shape the present. There is often a house, a portrait, a diary, or a piece of jewelry at the center of the mystery. There is also usually a woman who has been underestimated.

Her interest in the era is personal, too. She has said that both of her parents lived through the Second World War, and that generation’s sacrifices stayed with her. That may be one reason her novels are less interested in grand military strategy than in private lives, kitchens, art studios, hotel corridors, train stations, and the small choices that turn out to matter.

Carey now lives in Melbourne with her children and Italian greyhounds, and she still talks about her love of languages, art, travel, beaches, and music. That mix feels right for her fiction. The books are full of movement, but they are also full of rooms, paintings, recipes, dresses, and keepsakes, the ordinary things that make the past feel close enough to touch.