Ellie Curzon Books in Order

If you want the full village story: The Ration Book Baby → The Spitfire Girl → The Wartime Vet → Wartime Wishes for the Land Girls
If you prefer child-centred wartime drama: The Lost Orphans → The Lifeboat Orphans
If you like airfields, secrets, and romance: Under a Spitfire Sky
If you want codebreaking and spy trouble: The Codebreaker Girls

Ellie Curzon is the pen name Catherine Curzon shares with Helen Barrell, whose fiction readers may also know as Eleanor Harkstead. Together they write World War II sagas that mix home-front danger, romance, and community spirit. They began collaborating in spring 2017, and the partnership clicked because they brought slightly different skills to the same table: a love of history, a feel for character, and a weakness for tea and good tailoring.

Catherine came to the partnership from historical nonfiction. She writes about eighteenth-century royalty, old Hollywood, and vintage fashion, and she has also spoken widely about history. She holds a Master's degree in Film, grew up loving classic cinema, and has said that writing had been part of her life for years before it finally became her full-time job. These days she lives in Yorkshire, high on a very steep hill, with Dean Martin never too far away.

Helen's path runs through crime history, archives, and family research. She is originally from the south-east of England, later settled in the Midlands, and wrote two nonfiction books about Victorian crime before turning this part of her writing life toward wartime fiction. She has appeared on BBC1 and Radio 4, enjoys family history research, and clearly likes an afternoon in the archives.

Put them together, and the research in these books feels hard-earned rather than decorative.

Their early Ellie Curzon novels, Under a Spitfire Sky and The Codebreaker Girls, set out the kind of story they do well. One follows Florence, a Women's Auxiliary Air Force engineer keeping Spitfires in the air while danger creeps in close to home. The other drops Rosie Sinclair into the secret world of codebreaking, spies, and wartime nerves. Readers who like brisk plots usually notice the same thing quickly: these are not only love stories, and they are not only history lessons either.

From there they moved into the linked Bramble Heath books, starting with The Ration Book Baby and continuing through The Spitfire Girl, The Wartime Vet, and Wartime Wishes for the Land Girls. This is where their sense of place really shows. The village has farms, an airfield, shortages, gossip, grief, and people who keep turning up for one another. Characters can step forward as leads in one book and slip into the background in another, which gives the series a lived-in feel without making it hard for new readers to follow.

Then they turned their attention to children living right at the sharp edge of war.

In The Lost Orphans and The Lifeboat Orphans, the focus shifts to runaway evacuees, bombed-out London, and the kind of found family people build when the official systems have let them down. Those books were inspired by the real history of children who returned to the city during the Blitz, and you can feel that harder edge in them. The stories still have warmth, but they are also about hunger, fear, rescue work, and the hope that a child might still find safety and belonging.

Across the whole body of work, a few patterns keep turning up. Curzon's heroines do practical jobs. They repair aircraft, drive officers, care for babies, work the land, tend animals, and keep moving when common sense says hide. The settings matter too: blackout streets, village lanes, secret offices, snowy farms, and airfields where every takeoff might be the last. What readers tend to get from these books is a strong sense of usefulness, courage, and ordinary people doing the next needed thing.

The partnership itself is still a long-distance one. Catherine and Helen live in different parts of England, plot together, divide characters between them, and build each novel by combining research with story instinct. That probably explains why Ellie Curzon books often feel both cozy and tense at the same time. They know the history, but they never forget the human scale of it.