Glynis Peters Books in Order

If you want the full Red Cross Orphans journey: The Red Cross Orphans → The Orphan's Letters → The Orphan's Homecoming → The Orphan's Last Goodbye.
If you like wartime stories set in Coventry: The Secret Orphan → The Orphan Thief.
If you prefer deeply emotional orphan narratives: The Forgotten Orphan → The Orphan's Secret Library.
If you just want to sample her most famous book: The Secret Orphan.

Glynis Peters grew up on the Essex coast in the twin towns of Dovercourt and Harwich, where the sea and wide skies have always been part of the backdrop to her life. Today she still lives close to the shoreline, drawing on its changing moods when she writes about lives upended by war.

Before becoming a full time novelist, she spent many years working in health care. She trained as a nurse, put in long shifts on the wards, and later helped run community pharmacies, fitting her first attempts at fiction around demanding days and nights.

In 2005 she and her husband left Britain for a new adventure on the island of Cyprus. The move gave her space to write, and she began turning her love of the Victorian era into full length stories. Under the pen name Glynis Smy she self published historical romances, wrote poetry and magazine pieces, and quietly built a readership online.

By the time she returned to the UK in 2013 to care for her mother, she had several novels to her name and a clearer sense that writing was no longer just a hobby. Her Victorian novel Maggie's Child in particular found an enthusiastic audience and helped convince her to keep going.

Recognition followed when she was shortlisted for the Festival of Romance New Talent Award in 2014.

Not long after, she signed a publishing contract and moved into what she calls her hybrid phase, keeping the independence of self publishing while working closely with a traditional team. Her breakthrough World War II novel The Secret Orphan was published in 2018, set between bombed out Coventry and a Cornish farm and following a young woman who rescues a little girl during the Blitz and uncovers a dangerous secret. The book reached bestseller lists in the United Kingdom, North America, and beyond, and brought many new readers to her work.

She has since returned to the period with The Orphan Thief, about Coventry girl Ruby Shadwell rebuilding her life after losing her family in the Blitz, and The Forgotten Orphan, which follows Maisie Reynolds from a harsh Southampton orphanage into the upheaval of war and first love. In the Red Cross Orphans series, beginning with The Red Cross Orphans, she shifts the focus to volunteer nurse Kitty Pattison and her friends, exploring how friendship, duty, and love play out on overcrowded wartime hospital wards.

Across these books she writes about ordinary women pushed into extraordinary situations, found families that form in bomb shelters and barracks, and the way small acts of kindness can keep people going when the world feels like it is falling apart.

Her own nursing background helps her make sense of medical wards under pressure, and a family connection to Canada often appears in the form of Canadian pilots, paratroopers, and doctors who cross paths with her British heroines. She is interested in the quiet details of daily life during the 1940s, from rationing and blackouts to the weight of waiting for news in the post.

Away from the page she leads a grounded, seaside life. She married her school sweetheart in 1979, and they have three grown children and several grandchildren. Now a retired NHS nurse, she spends her free time making hand crafted greeting cards, cross stitching, fishing with her husband, and walking a lively cockapoo along the promenade.