Hazel Gaynor Books in Order
Explore Hazel Gaynor's historical novels in order, with book summaries, reading guidance, background on her work, and tips on the best place to begin.
Last updated: January 13, 2026
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Publication Order
13 books
Before Dorothy
by Hazel Gaynor
2025
In 1920s Chicago, Irish immigrant Emily Kelly leaves her beloved sister behind to chase a farming dream with husband Henry Gale on the Kansas prairie. Years later, their orphaned niece Dorothy comes to live with them just as Dust Bowl storms, buried secrets, and questions of home threaten the family.
Christmas with the Queen
by Hazel Gaynor
2024
In 1950s Britain, single mother Olive Carter finally lands a chance to cover the young Queen Elizabeth's Christmas broadcast, bringing her back into the orbit of wartime friend Jack Devereux, now a royal chef. Over several festive seasons, career dreams, secrets, and a tender second-chance romance intertwine at Sandringham.
The Last Lifeboat
by Hazel Gaynor
2023
During the Second World War, shy teacher Alice King escorts British children being evacuated by sea, while London mother Lily Nichols makes the agonizing choice to send her son and daughter away. When their ship is torpedoed and one lifeboat drifts alone in the Atlantic, Alice and Lily's stories collide in a fight for survival.
Three Words for Goodbye
by Hazel Gaynor
2021
In 1937 New York, estranged sisters Clara and Madeleine Sommers agree to carry their dying grandmother's farewell letters across Europe. Crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and racing by train through Paris, Venice, and Vienna, they confront family secrets, looming war, and the chance to forgive each other.
When We Were Young & Brave
by Hazel Gaynor
2020
At a missionary school in northern China in 1941, teacher Elspeth Kent and ten-year-old pupil Nancy Plummer see their secure world overturned when Japanese forces take control. As they are moved from school to internment camp, their Girl Guide troop becomes a lifeline of courage, duty, and hope.
Meet Me in Monaco
by Hazel Gaynor
2019
On the 1950s French Riviera, struggling perfumer Sophie Duval shelters movie star Grace Kelly from a persistent photographer, James Henderson. That brief encounter ties the three together as Grace's royal wedding brings Sophie and James back into each other's orbit, testing their dreams and loyalties.
The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter
by Hazel Gaynor
2018
In 1838, lighthouse keeper's daughter Grace Darling risks her life in a North Sea storm to rescue shipwreck survivors and is thrust into unwanted fame. A century later, disgraced Irish girl Matilda Emmerson is sent to a Rhode Island lighthouse, where a forgotten portrait uncovers their shared legacy.
The Cottingley Secret
by Hazel Gaynor
2017
In 1917, cousins Frances and Elsie photograph fairies in a Yorkshire garden, sparking worldwide fascination. A century later, grieving bookbinder Olivia Kavanagh discovers their story in an old manuscript and, through the mystery of the photographs, begins to reclaim her own life.
Last Christmas in Paris
by Hazel Gaynor
2017
Through letters swapped between spirited Evie Elliott at home and soldier-turned-journalist Thomas Harding at the Western Front, this World War I love story follows their changing hopes from 1914 to a bittersweet Christmastime reunion in Paris decades later.
The Girl from the Savoy
by Hazel Gaynor
2016
After the First World War, maid Dolly Lane takes a job at London's Savoy Hotel, dreaming of the stage instead of laundry rooms. Becoming muse to a songwriter pulls her into the theatre world and forces her to confront buried grief and impossible choices.
Hush
by Hazel Gaynor
2016
On the final morning of the First World War, village midwife Annie Rawlins battles to save a newborn while her son fights one last patrol in France. As the Armistice bells approach, both cling to the fragile hope of a new beginning.
A Memory of Violets
by Hazel Gaynor
2015
In Victorian London, orphaned sisters Flora and Rosie Flynn sell violets on the streets until a heartbreaking separation tears them apart. Decades later, shy Tilly Harper finds Flora's hidden notebook and is drawn into a search that transforms her own life.
The Girl Who Came Home
by Hazel Gaynor
2012
Seventeen-year-old Maggie Murphy sails from rural Ireland on the Titanic, leaving her sweetheart behind and surviving the disaster against the odds. Seventy years later, her great-granddaughter Grace uncovers Maggie's hidden past, reshaping both women's futures in unexpected ways.
Where should I start?
If you want her most iconic starting point: The Girl Who Came Home → A Memory of Violets → The Girl from the Savoy
If you love epistolary love stories: Last Christmas in Paris → Three Words for Goodbye
If you prefer World War II dramas: When We Were Young & Brave → The Last Lifeboat
If you want a touch of magic and folklore: The Cottingley Secret → The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter
If royal and Oz-adjacent stories appeal: Meet Me in Monaco → Christmas with the Queen → Before Dorothy
Author bio
Hazel Gaynor is an English-born novelist who has made Ireland her home and the center of her writing life. She is known for historical stories that follow ordinary women through extraordinary moments, from the Titanic to the Dust Bowl and far beyond. Her novels have reached bestseller lists in several countries and have been translated into twenty languages, published in twenty-seven territories worldwide.
She grew up in the market town of Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire, spending holidays on the nearby coast around Bridlington and Flamborough. After studying business at Manchester Metropolitan University, she worked in Manchester, Australia, and London in professional services roles before moving to Ireland and settling in County Kildare with her husband and their two sons.
She joined a Dublin law firm as a learning and development executive and built a busy life that balanced corporate work with parenting. When the global recession hit and she was made redundant from that job, the steady career she had imagined suddenly vanished.
Losing that job became the turning point she had not expected.
At her kitchen table, surrounded by Lego and breakfast dishes, she started blogging about the chaos and comedy of stay at home parenting. The blog grew into Hot Cross Mum, an e book about life after redundancy, and showed her that readers were hungry for honest, warm stories. She began to write more widely about writing itself, interviewing other authors and sharing hard won lessons, and later helped to launch The Inspiration Project, a series of friendly, practical workshops for aspiring writers.
Her breakthrough in fiction came with The Girl Who Came Home, first self published and later acquired by HarperCollins. Inspired by the true story of Irish emigrants on the Titanic, the novel went on to become a New York Times and USA Today bestseller and won the Romantic Novelists' Association Historical Novel of the Year award. It also brought her a devoted readership for her blend of careful research and deeply felt, character driven storytelling.
Gaynor followed with A Memory of Violets, about Victorian flower sellers in London's Covent Garden, and The Girl from the Savoy, set amid postwar glamour and grief in 1920s London. In The Cottingley Secret she revisits the famous fairies photographs through a dual timeline that links the girls who took the pictures to a modern day woman trying to mend her own life. The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter grew from a lifelong fascination with real life heroine Grace Darling and pairs that 1838 rescue with a later story of a young woman sent to a Rhode Island lighthouse on the eve of another storm.
Many of her later novels return to the Second World War from unexpected angles.
When We Were Young & Brave is set at a school for missionaries' children in northern China and follows pupils and teachers as they endure occupation and internment under Japanese control. The Last Lifeboat draws on the lesser known evacuation of British children overseas and the true story of a torpedoed ship, tracing one crowded lifeboat across the Atlantic and the mother left behind. In Before Dorothy she steps into the world behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, imagining the early life of Emily Gale on a Kansas farm and the Dust Bowl years that shape the aunt who will one day raise Dorothy.
Alongside these solo novels, she has collaborated with American author Heather Webb on several books. Together they have written Last Christmas in Paris, an epistolary World War I romance, Meet Me in Monaco, set around Grace Kelly's royal wedding on the Cote d'Azur, Three Words for Goodbye, which sends two sisters across prewar Europe, and Christmas with the Queen, which circles around the early years of Queen Elizabeth II's Christmas broadcasts. Their first collaboration won a Star award for women's fiction, and later books have been shortlisted for prizes in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the United States. Across all of her work, Gaynor tends to focus on women who find quiet reserves of bravery in times of upheaval, whether that is a maid chasing a stage career, a schoolgirl facing internment, or a mother putting her children on a ship to safety. She continues to write from her home in County Kildare, balancing family life with the long, slow work of the novel and the many conversations that follow when those stories find their readers.
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