Jane Thynne Books in Order

If you want gripping Berlin spy fiction: Black Roses → The Winter Garden → A War of Flowers → Faith and Beauty → Solitaire.
If you prefer feminist alternate history: Widowland → Queen Wallis / Queen High.
If you like dual timeline family drama: The Words I Never Wrote.
If you enjoy earlier standalones and love stories: Patrimony → The Shell House → The Weighing of the Heart.
If you are curious about her non fiction voice: Tips for Meanies.

Jane Thynne was born in Venezuela and grew up largely in London, moving with her parents and two brothers before the family finally settled there. From early on she was drawn to stories about the past and how ordinary people live through extraordinary times.

She attended Lady Eleanor Holles School in Hampton, then spent a year working at the Old Vic Theatre, surrounded by actors, sets, and rehearsal rooms. That backstage view of performance would later feed into her fiction, where stages, film studios, and carefully constructed identities play a central part. After that gap year she read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, studying the literature she already loved.

After university she joined the BBC as a production trainee and learned how to direct and produce television across drama and current affairs. A few years later she moved into newspapers, first at The Sunday Times and then at The Daily Telegraph and The Independent, writing features and columns and regularly appearing on radio. Journalism gave her a sharp eye for telling detail and a habit of wide reading that still shapes her novels.

While she was working in newsrooms she began writing fiction in the margins of her day job. Her debut novel, Patrimony, follows a young film maker digging into the life of a First World War poet and questioning the myths built around him. The Shell House shifts between contemporary politics and the 1930s, when a vanished woman and a ruined garden pavilion hide the truth about a family. The Weighing of the Heart takes readers from 1920s London to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, weaving a love story around the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb.

Over time her fascination narrowed to the 1930s and 1940s, especially the lives of women in Nazi Germany. That focus became the Clara Vine series, beginning with Black Roses and continuing through The Winter Garden, A War of Flowers, Faith and Beauty, Solitaire and The Judgement of Stars. Clara, a half British, half German actress in Berlin, moves between film sets, Nazi salons, and intelligence offices, giving readers a close view of how ideology, glamour, and fear collided in everyday life.

Thynne is particularly interested in the spaces where official history thins out and forgotten women step into view.

Writing under the name C. J. Carey, she has also created the Rose Ransom novels, beginning with Widowland and Queen High (published in some regions as Queen Wallis). These books imagine a 1950s Britain that has become a German protectorate, where women are sorted into castes and classic literature is quietly rewritten. Through Rose, a privileged civil servant who starts to question the regime, Thynne explores censorship, propaganda, and the stubborn power of books.

Her standalone novel The Words I Never Wrote returns to the years before and during the Second World War, tracing two English sisters separated by marriage, politics, and distance and the modern woman who uncovers their story. More recently she has launched the Fox and Fry novels, including Midnight in Vienna, about a suspended intelligence officer and a young tutor drawn into espionage on the eve of war.

Thynne is known for the depth of her research, but she tends to talk about it in very practical terms. Years as a reporter taught her to follow footnotes, chase archives, and treat memoirs and letters as clues, not decoration. She has judged literary and broadcasting awards, continues to write as a freelance journalist, and appears regularly as a broadcaster. Widowed after the death of her husband, crime writer Philip Kerr, she lives in London with their three children nearby, still writing stories that look sideways at history through the lives of women.