Hands of Time Books in Order

The Hands of Time series begins with Valerie Crane, a recently divorced New Yorker who escapes to the English coast only to be flung four centuries into the past. Exploring the ruins of Yealm Castle, she stumbles through a time-twisting device and lands in 1605, face to face with the very real, very inhabited version of the castle she thought was a ruin.

There she meets Alec Whitfield, the reserved master of the estate, and his charming younger brother Finlay. Valerie’s insistence that she is from the future makes her sound mad, yet her manners and knowledge clearly mark her as different. As she is drawn into the brothers’ world, she also finds herself entangled in the politics and dangers of the early seventeenth century, including the conspiracy surrounding the Gunpowder Plot.

Later books widen the lens. Valerie’s sister Louisa, grieving and alone, chooses to follow her into the past and ends up on her own hazardous journey that takes her across the Atlantic to colonial Virginia. Between them, the sisters and the people they love become part of events ranging from the early English colonies to the American Revolutionary War, and the story stretches across several generations of the Whitfield and Sheridan families.

Time travel in this series is not a tidy device but a risky, limited tool. The antique clock and related mechanisms that move characters through time carry real danger, from being stranded in the wrong year to losing the chance to return home at all. The emotional heart of the books lies in what people are willing to sacrifice – comfort, safety, even their own era – for the sake of love and family.

As the saga unfolds, familiar characters grow older, children come of age under very different skies, and the future knowledge some of them carry becomes both an asset and a burden. Novellas set at the summer and winter solstices and at Christmas zoom in on smaller episodes, like Finn’s brief visit to the twenty first century or a misjudged trip that lands a modern teen in Ancient Egypt, showing how far the ripples of the original time jump can spread.

Overall the tone is warm, romantic, and adventurous. Battles and political plots sit alongside domestic scenes, farm work, and quiet moments between partners trying to hold a marriage together in circumstances no vows ever imagined. Readers who enjoy long-running family stories threaded through with time-bending twists will find plenty to sink into here.