James D Shipman Books in Order

James D. Shipman grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a region he still calls home. History was an early interest, and it became part of his path as both a reader and a writer. His novels range from medieval Constantinople to the Civil War, World War II, and the uneasy first years of the Cold War.

He began publishing poems and short stories while studying history at the University of Washington. That early work gave him a way to combine a love of the past with the human side of big events, the people trying to make choices while history bears down on them.

Shipman later earned a law degree from Gonzaga University. In 2004, he opened his own law firm and has continued working as a practicing attorney alongside writing fiction.

It is a busy combination, but it suits the shape of his books. Shipman is interested in research, difficult decisions, and the pressure that comes when someone has to act before all the facts are clear. His stories often put characters in dangerous systems, whether that means a wartime occupation, a prison camp, a family strained by war, or a city preparing for siege.

His first novel, Constantinopolis, takes readers to the 1453 struggle for the Byzantine capital, following Sultan Mehmet II and Emperor Constantine XI as each faces the coming battle from opposite sides of the city walls. Going Home moves to the Civil War era and follows Irish immigrant Joseph Forsyth through betrayal, family obligations, and a brutal wartime wound. In It is Well, the focus shifts to a Washington State family on the home front after Pearl Harbor.

World War II is especially central to Shipman's later work. A Bitter Rain follows a German man whose faith in the Nazi cause is tested by the persecution of people he knows. Task Force Baum draws on the dangerous 1945 raid to free prisoners from a camp behind German lines. Irena's War fictionalizes the work of Polish social worker and resistance member Irena Sendler, whose rescue efforts saved Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto.

The stakes are personal.

In Beyond the Wire, Shipman turns to the 1944 revolt at Birkenau, where prisoners decide whether resistance is possible even when the odds are terrible. Before the Storm takes place in Berlin in 1948, as a German woman and two Holocaust survivors pursue a wanted Nazi scientist during the Berlin Blockade. His newer novels, A Time for Defiance and Crossing the Line, return to occupied Europe, focusing on women navigating resistance, survival, and moral compromise.

Shipman lives in Washington State with his family. He has said that he enjoys reading historical nonfiction, traveling, and spending time with them. Those interests show up in the careful period settings of his fiction, but the books keep their attention on people first.