Lorna Cook Books in Order

If you want her signature wartime mysteries: The Forgotten Village / The Forgotten Wife → The Forbidden Promise → The Girl From the Island
If you want glamorous history and big secrets: The Dressmaker’s Secret → The Hidden Letters → The Lost Memories
If you want the new Cornish family saga: The Distant Daughter → The Gilded Girl
If you want her contemporary love stories: The Man I Never Met → The Last Train Home → The Wedding Game → It Was You All Along

Lorna Cook worked as a journalist, writing for magazine titles connected with the Daily Mail and Associated Press, then moved into PR. She now writes full-time under two names, historical fiction as Lorna Cook and contemporary love stories as Elle Cook. She lives in coastal Essex with her husband and their two daughters.

She came to publishing later than she expected.

By her own account, reading came long before any serious plan to be an author. In 2017, during a hectic stretch of work and family life, she started writing the kind of novel she wanted to read, a big emotional story with romance, mystery, and the past pressing on the present. She joined the Romantic Novelists' Association New Writers' Scheme, found an agent quickly, and moved from first draft to publication at unusual speed.

That first breakthrough was The Forgotten Village, published in 2019 and also issued in Canada as The Forgotten Wife. The book sold strongly, spent months high on the Kindle charts, and won both the Romantic Novelists' Association Katie Fforde Debut Romantic Novel of the Year Award and the Joan Hessayon Award for New Writers. It also set the pattern readers now expect from her, a strong sense of place, a love story under pressure, and a secret from the past that refuses to stay buried.

Her historical novels tend to work in dual timelines, but they do not all visit the same corner of history. The Forbidden Promise heads to the Scottish Highlands, where a wartime promise ripples into the present. The Girl From the Island explores occupied Guernsey. The Dressmaker’s Secret moves into Nazi-occupied Paris and the shadow of Coco Chanel. Readers who like her books usually talk about the same things, the emotional pull, the hidden family threads, and the way the settings feel lived in rather than postcard-pretty.

Place matters a lot in her fiction.

Later books kept widening the map. The Hidden Letters turns to an English estate garden and a forbidden romance shaped by war, while The Lost Memories follows love, loss, and family truth across generations in Suffolk. In 2025 she began The Secrets of Trelenna House with The Distant Daughter, the start of a new Cornish family saga, and followed it with The Gilded Girl, another story of Trelenna House, buried history, and women making hard choices across time.

She also wanted room to write stories set fully in the present, so she launched contemporary fiction as Elle Cook. That side of her work includes The Man I Never Met, about a wrong number that turns into a life-changing connection, and The Last Train Home, a romance built around timing, chance, and a late-night train. Then came The Wedding Game and It Was You All Along, both leaning into messy feelings, missed chances, and the question of whether fate really knows what it is doing.

Even with two names and two shelves' worth of books, her interests stay pretty consistent. She likes love stories, history, secrets, and ordinary people pushed into difficult choices. She has spoken about learning to write partly by reading the authors she loved and studying, almost by instinct, how their stories were built.

These days she is still based in Essex, still writing across both strands of her career, and still very much a reader. If her author notes are anything to go by, a good book and a glass of wine are never far away.