Liz Fenwick Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: The Cornish House → A Cornish Affair → A Cornish Stranger
If you love family secrets and grand houses: The Path to the Sea → The River Between Us → The Secrets of Harbour House
If you want wartime romance and suspense: The Returning Tide → The Secret Shore
If you want a warm, emotional modern read: One Cornish Summer → Flora's Day

Liz Fenwick was born in Massachusetts and grew up near Boston, in Malden. She studied English literature at Mount Holyoke College, with minors in creative writing and medieval studies. Books were part of the plan long before publication finally caught up with her.

Writing started early.

As a child she made up stories, and by the time she was around twelve she was writing them down. Her college creative writing thesis was already two thirds of a novel, which makes her later career look less like a surprise and more like a promise delayed. Still, after graduation she chose a practical route and trained as an insurance broker.

In 1989 she moved to England, soon met her future husband, Chris, and stepped into a life that would involve a lot of packing and unpacking. Over the years his work took the family through Canada, Russia, the United States, Indonesia, and the UAE. Along the way they raised three children and bought a home in Cornwall in 1996.

Those years gave her plenty to draw on. Fenwick wrote nonfiction about family life abroad and the strange skills that come with being the person who keeps a household steady through repeated international moves. She has spoken openly about how hard it can be to keep your own career moving when everyone else is changing countries.

Then came the reset.

On New Year's Eve in 2003, she decided that 2004 would be the year she wrote more, and this time she meant it. She wrote and rewrote, joined the Romantic Novelists' Association, went to conferences, took feedback seriously, and learned how to finish what she started. She began The Cornish House in 2004, found an agent in 2011, and saw her debut published in 2012, when she was forty-nine.

Cornwall is the constant thread through her fiction. Fenwick has said she fell in love with the place on her first visit in June 1989, and that love shows up everywhere, in creeks, cliff paths, old houses, gardens, family legends, and weather that can turn in a page. Readers who pick up The Cornish House, A Cornish Affair, Under a Cornish Sky, or One Cornish Summer usually know what they are signing up for: emotional stories, Cornish settings, hidden history, and women trying to rebuild a life after loss, betrayal, or a hard turn they did not see coming.

Her later books stretched that range without losing the same emotional pull. The River Between Us uses hidden letters and the Tamar to connect past and present. The Secret Shore brings wartime work, espionage, and romance onto the coast, while The Secrets of Harbour House follows art, grief, and a mystery that reaches from Cornwall to Venice. What ties the books together is simple: Fenwick likes places with memory, and characters who have to earn their way toward hope.

The awards followed in a steady, grounded way. A Cornish Affair won the Romantic Readers Award in 2013. The River Between Us won the RNA Popular Romantic Fiction Award in 2022, and The Secret Shore was shortlisted for the RNA Historical Romantic Novel Award in 2024. Her books have also been translated into fifteen languages. These days she lives in Cornwall and keeps writing from the landscape that first pulled her in decades ago, jokingly describing herself as a writer, cat wrangler, and dreamer turned doer.