Mandy Robotham Books in Order

If you want to begin with her World War II stories: A Woman of War / The German Midwife → The Secret Messenger → The Berlin Girl.
If you like divided cities and Cold War tension: The Berlin Girl → The Girl Behind the Wall → The Hidden Storyteller.
If you enjoy resistance tales by sea and radio: The Resistance Girl → The War Pianist.
If you prefer postwar crime and spy vibes: The Hidden Storyteller → A Dangerous Game.
If you want a sweeping life story beyond the war: The Scandalous Life of Ruby Devereaux.

Mandy Robotham grew up in Tottenham in North London and later settled in Gloucestershire, where the hills and coffee shops have become part of her writing routine. From childhood she loved stories and imagined one day seeing her own name on a book cover.

As a teenager she scribbled stories in notebooks and, after reading Harriet the Spy, realised she wanted to be the writer rather than the sleuth. The dream sat quietly in the background while adult life pulled her in other directions.

Straight out of university she trained as a journalist, working on local papers and in London before going freelance.

Everything changed when she had her first child in the mid nineteen nineties. A powerful experience of birth nudged her into retraining as a midwife, and she spent around two decades caring for women and babies in and around Stroud.

For years she juggled community shifts, raising two sons and writing articles for midwifery journals. The urge to tell longer stories never went away, though, and eventually she joined a local writing group and enrolled on a part time MA in Creative Writing at Oxford Brookes University.

Her debut novel, A Woman of War (published internationally as The German Midwife), grew directly out of that mix of medical knowledge and historical curiosity. Set in 1944 Germany, it follows camp prisoner and midwife Anke Hoff as she is forced to care for a woman in Hitler's inner circle, and it went on to reach bestseller lists such as USA Today, Globe and Mail and Kindle Top 100 charts in multiple countries.

Since then she has written a string of World War Two and Cold War novels that focus on ordinary people caught in extraordinary times. The Secret Messenger explores the Italian resistance in occupied Venice, The Berlin Girl and The Girl Behind the Wall capture life in a divided Berlin, while The Resistance Girl and The War Pianist highlight clandestine work in Norway and the Netherlands.

With The Hidden Storyteller and later A Dangerous Game, she follows familiar characters into the rubble of postwar Hamburg and the fog bound streets of 1950s London, blending crime, espionage and the long shadows cast by conflict. Writing as M. J. Robotham, she also created the sweeping faux memoir The Scandalous Life of Ruby Devereaux, tracing one woman's adventures across the later twentieth century.

Across her books she returns to a few clear threads, the resilience of women, moral choices under pressure and the quiet acts of courage that rarely make the history books.

Today she writes full time from Gloucestershire, usually with a flat white and her dog Basil nearby. When she is not at the keyboard she reads widely, knits what her family cheerfully describe as odd things and keeps a notebook handy for the next story that insists on being told.