Kirsty Manning Books in Order

Kirsty Manning grew up in northern New South Wales, Australia. She was born in Armidale and spent her early childhood on mixed farming properties near Kingstown and Cumnock before her family moved to Tamworth when she was about ten. Country life, wide horizons, and a love of travel have stayed close to her work.

She studied at the University of Sydney and holds degrees in literature and communications. Before becoming a novelist, Manning worked in book publishing as an editor and later wrote freelance lifestyle and travel journalism. It was a useful combination, one job taught her how books are made, while the other gave her a reason to keep looking closely at places and people.

Books were already her day job, but writing fiction came later.

For her fortieth birthday, Manning gave herself an online creative writing course. Early chapters caught the attention of her tutors, and she took time to finish the manuscript that became her first novel, The Midsummer Garden. The book was published in 2017, beginning a career built around stories that connect a carefully researched past with a more immediate present.

Midsummer Garden moves between a fifteenth-century French château and Tasmania in 2014. A young cook named Artemisia and marine expert Pip Arnet are separated by centuries, but old copper pots link their lives. Food, gardens, family stories, and women trying to choose their own futures are all part of the book's fabric.

That interest in history's unfinished business runs through much of Manning's work.

In The Jade Lily, also published as The Song of the Jade Lily, she turns to wartime Shanghai, where the friendship between local girl Li and Jewish refugee Romy is tested by war. The Lost Jewels follows a present-day jewellery historian tracing the secrets behind the Cheapside Hoard and her great-grandmother's life in Edwardian London. Both books move across generations without losing sight of the personal cost of big historical events.

Her later standalones keep finding intimate ways into the past. The French Gift follows a Resistance fighter and former maid during World War II, alongside a modern bookseller trying to uncover an old crime on the Riviera. The Hidden Book draws on the real story of photographs secretly preserved from Mauthausen concentration camp, following the people connected to a dangerous wartime record.

Manning also shifted into mystery with the Charlie James novels. In The Paris Mystery, Australian journalist Charlotte "Charlie" James arrives in Paris in 1938 determined to prove herself as a newspaper correspondent, then finds a murder waiting at a society party. Murder in Paris continues Charlie's story as she investigates the disappearance of a young American tourist in a city full of glamour, secrets, and rising unease before the war.

Manning lives in Melbourne with her husband. Together they are partners in the wine bar Bellota and the Prince Wine Store, businesses with locations in Melbourne and Sydney. Her travels through Europe, the United States, and Asia continue to feed the settings she returns to on the page.