Gemma Liviero Books in Order

If you want World War II fiction first: Broken Angels → The Road Beyond Ruin → Pastel Orphans
If you prefer World War I grief and family secrets: In a Field of Blue → Half in Shadow
If you want her darkest historical read: An Age of Winters
If you want gothic fantasy instead: Marek → Lilah

Gemma Liviero is an Australian novelist who lives on the outskirts of Brisbane, Queensland, with her family. Before her novels reached a wide readership, she spent years doing the kind of writing that pays the bills and sharpens the tools: copywriting, corporate work, feature articles, editorials, and editing. That steady professional background helps explain why her books feel carefully built, even when the emotions inside them are anything but tidy.

Writing was there early.

As a girl, she was the kind of kid who could drift into a story without much encouragement. She has said that when she was not out riding her bike, she was indoors writing poetry and short stories, and she won short story competitions before she was published. After school she kept at it, took creative writing classes, and eventually studied for an advanced diploma in professional writing. Her working life took her through publishing, printing, advertising, public relations, office work, and design for print, all while she kept writing fiction in her spare hours.

It did not happen fast. Early novels were rejected, and she kept going. The real turning point came in her early forties with Pastel Orphans, a World War II novel she first self published in 2013. The book later became a finalist in the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and that momentum helped lead to a traditional publishing deal.

History pulled her in for good.

That shift matters because Liviero's fiction is deeply tied to the past, especially to moments when ordinary people are forced into impossible choices. Pastel Orphans follows siblings torn apart by Nazi policy, while Broken Angels brings together a Jewish girl in the Lodz Ghetto, an abducted child, and a Nazi doctor whose conscience will not stay quiet. Readers often come to these books for the wartime setting, but stay for the human part: families under pressure, moral compromise, and the stubborn ways hope can survive.

She kept widening the map. The Road Beyond Ruin moves into the wreckage of 1945 Germany, where an Italian POW and a lost child stumble into a house full of secrets. In a Field of Blue looks at grief and unanswered questions after World War I, and Half in Shadow follows a young woman in occupied Belgium trying to survive a double life of service and resistance. Across all three, Liviero seems especially interested in what happens after the first shock, when people must keep living, keep choosing, and keep carrying what war has done to them.

She has also never been only one kind of writer. Alongside the historical novels, she wrote the dark fantasy pair Marek and Lilah, books full of hidden ancestry, remote castles, and old supernatural menace. Later, An Age of Winters took her back to seventeenth century Germany and the fear soaked world of witch hunts. Even when the period changes, the questions underneath stay familiar: who gets judged, who gets protected, what people do with guilt, and how much of the past can really stay buried.

These days, Liviero is still based in Queensland, still balancing writing with family life, and, by her own account, still squeezing history study in between books. She is a wife, a mother of two adult children, and a novelist who took the long road to publication. That long road seems to suit her work. Her stories rarely rush past pain, but they do keep moving toward endurance, connection, and the hard won chance of a future.