Home Fires Books in Order

Under the Home Fires banner, S Block's novels extend the life of the television drama into a full wartime saga. Keep the Home Fires Burning, A Woman's War and A Woman's Courage follow the women of Great Paxford from the uneasy early months of the Second World War into its darker middle years. You don't need to have seen the series, but if you have, these stories answer the question of what happened next.

Great Paxford is imagined as a small Cheshire village perched at the crossroads of three hills, close enough to industrial cities to feel the air raids yet rural enough that land, livestock and food production really matter. Frances Barden, as chair of the Women's Institute, often finds herself mediating between farmers like Steph Farrow, shopkeepers such as Miriam Brindsley and families like the Campbells, who are reeling from personal loss. The novels lean into that ensemble feel, shifting between households while keeping the WI at the centre.

The war here is as much emotional as it is military.

In Keep the Home Fires Burning, a wartime plane crash in or near the village acts as a shock wave. Factories close, new lodgers and evacuees arrive, and long-buried secrets about marriages, children and past loyalties are forced into the open. The book bridges the gap between the endpoint of the TV drama and the harsher realities that follow in later years.

A Woman's War widens the frame as enemy raids intensify over the north-west of England. Teresa Lucas tries to reinvent herself as the perfect officer's wife just as a new guest unsettles her home, Laura Campbell is grieving her father while being pulled toward a different future and Pat Simms wonders whether escape from her old life is truly possible. Steph Farrow, haunted by her own choices, shows how even people far from the front line can feel pinned down by what they have done.

By the time of A Woman's Courage, the village has been living with war for years. Pat is struggling with guilt and the strangeness of new freedom, Sarah Collingborne is filling her husband's place while he remains in a prisoner-of-war camp, Teresa is facing motherhood under strain and Alison Scotlock edges toward a new relationship. The Brindsleys, meanwhile, are learning that good fortune can turn just as quickly as bad.

Across the trilogy, Block keeps the focus on small rooms and hard decisions rather than battles and commanders. The books are about women who organise food drives, rescue neighbours, fall in and out of love and quietly bend rules to protect the people they care about. Readers come for the World War II setting, but they tend to stay for the way this little community feels lived-in, flawed and full of stubborn hope.