Helen Carey Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: Lavender Road → Some Sunny Day → On A Wing And A Prayer → London Calling
If you want the final wartime arc: London Calling → The Other Side of the Street → Victory Girls
If you prefer contemporary suspense: Slick deals
If you want a romantic standalone: The Art of Loving

Helen Carey was born in Oxford and grew up in a hotel there, surrounded by a steady stream of guests, staff, and stories. She has suggested that living among so many different people at such a young age may have been the first nudge toward a life in fiction.

After leaving school, she went looking for travel and adventure and joined the British Army on a three-year Short Service Commission. Later she studied at the London School of Economics, where she took a BSc in Anthropology, Linguistics and Law.

Before she became a published novelist, Carey built up the kind of varied working life that gives a writer plenty to draw on. She has worked as a tour guide, an international oil trader, and a management consultant in London. She also spent time reading for a literary agency and a publishing house, experience that sharpened her eye for story structure and character. A background like that helps explain why her novels are interested in work as well as feeling, and in the way jobs shape the people who do them.

She always wanted to write.

As a child she made up stories for fun, and she has said she would sometimes rather stay indoors writing than go to the beach. That early love of storytelling never really went away. Neither did her interest in research, which helps explain why her novels often feel grounded in the practical details of work, place, and everyday life. Her stated aim as a writer is simple, to entertain.

A real turning point came with The Art of Loving. The book was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists' Association New Writers' Award, which helped her find an agent and start her publishing career. Soon after that, a publisher asked her agent to look for a new writer who could build a Second World War series. Carey had already begun working on wartime material, and she had shown the start of a novel set in 1944. A chance encounter with a neighbour who pointed out the sites of old air-raid shelters on Clapham Common helped spark what became Lavender Road.

That book grew into the six novel Lavender Road sequence, later joined by Some Sunny Day, On A Wing And A Prayer, London Calling, The Other Side of the Street, and Victory Girls. Over six books and more than a million words, Carey followed the same street through the full sweep of the war. The series stays close to ordinary Londoners, especially women, as bombs fall, work changes, families split and reform, and private hopes keep colliding with public history. Readers who warm to Carey usually like the same things, a big cast, strong women, emotional momentum, and the sense that history is happening not in grand speeches but in kitchens, pubs, hospitals, shelters, and ordinary front rooms.

Her books are often about ordinary people being forced to find out what they are made of.

That shows up outside the wartime novels too. Slick Deals uses Carey's own background in oil trading to fuel a contemporary thriller about kidnapping, political scandal, and environmental risk on the Welsh coast. The Art of Loving, by contrast, leans into romance, humour, and the complications of attraction in an unfamiliar place. Across both kinds of book, she tends to return to the same questions, who gets to change, what pressure reveals, and how love, work, class, or loyalty can pull people in opposite directions.

Carey has taught creative writing at university level and worked with students through the Royal Literary Fund. She is also a member of the Society of Authors and the Romantic Novelists' Association. Now based in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, she lives with her husband on a small coastal farm they run as a conservation project. She paints as well as writes, loves wildlife, and for several years opened her studio to visitors. It sounds like a calm life, but even there the world still seems to find its way into the work, from coastline and landscape to the rescued Greek dog who joined the family after an epic drive back to Wales.