Kristina McMorris Books in Order

Kristina McMorris writes historical novels that begin with a personal choice and reveal how much can follow from it. A letter written for someone else, a photograph taken in passing, or a marriage made before the world changes can draw her characters into consequences they didn't anticipate. Her stories place relationships inside recognizable historical pressures, with the past shaping the practical decisions people must make rather than remaining behind them as scenery.

Her route to fiction began with a family project. In 2001, she gathered her grandmother's recipes for what became a self-published cookbook. While collecting material for its biographical section, she discovered letters her grandfather had sent during his wartime naval service. Learning how much of her grandparents' courtship had happened through correspondence prompted questions about how well people can know one another through words alone.

Those questions eventually became a novel.

Letters from Home, published in 2011, follows a wartime correspondence in which the person composing the letters isn't the woman the soldier thinks is answering. McMorris turns the idea into more than a mistaken identity: the letters give people a way to express feelings they might not otherwise reveal, while making honesty increasingly difficult. The family discovery supplied an imaginative starting point, rather than a requirement to reproduce her grandparents' lives exactly.

Bridge of Scarlet Leaves follows Maddie and Lane, who marry just before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lane is Japanese American, and the couple's private decision becomes inseparable from wartime prejudice and incarceration. The story carries forward McMorris's interest in relationships tested by events outside the participants' control. Love matters, but it doesn't erase the institutions and attitudes that can change what a family is allowed to do.

In Sold on a Monday, a photograph of children beside a sign offering them for sale becomes the beginning of a story about the consequences of an image. Set during the Depression, the novel connects a journalist's ambitions with a family's vulnerability. The book has sold more than a million copies. Its premise also shows how McMorris uses a concrete historical detail to open larger questions about responsibility, intention, and what happens after a person thinks a brief encounter is finished.

The Ways We Hide moves into wartime intelligence through Fenna Vos, an illusionist whose skills attract British interest. A profession based on deception becomes part of an effort with real lives at stake. McMorris combines the unusual practical work with the character's earlier experiences, allowing the historical adventure and the private story to affect one another. What someone has learned to survive can later become useful in circumstances she never expected.

Her characters' inner lives remain part of the historical action.

Before her fiction career, McMorris worked in media, events, and public relations. She earned an international marketing degree at Pepperdine University and has also written shorter fiction and collaborated on books, including the picture book Ellie Mae Dreams Big! with her artist sister Amanda Yoshida. She divides her time between San Diego and Portland, Oregon. Across the changing periods and forms, her work returns to families, difficult choices, and the possibilities of understanding a past that can still alter the present.