Martha Conway Books in Order

Martha Conway grew up in northern Ohio, the sixth of seven daughters. She has said that being the youngest girl in a big Irish-American family sometimes left her feeling unheard. Writing gave her a way to make space for her own voice.

She started with poetry, then moved into stories. Those early stories often involved magic and groups of friends, two interests that still show up in different forms in her work.

Conway studied History and English at Vassar College, then earned a master's degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. The past had always interested her as a reader, especially places and lives unlike her own, and that curiosity became a useful foundation for historical fiction.

Her first published novel, 12 Bliss Street, arrived in 2003. Set in San Francisco, it follows a restless woman whose ordinary routine gives way to kidnapping and danger. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award, and it introduced Conway as a writer who could build tension while keeping close to a character's private worries and bad decisions.

Then she turned more fully toward the past.

In Thieving Forest, a teenage girl crosses the dangerous Ohio wilderness in 1806 after her four sisters are taken from their home. The novel won the North American Book Award for Best Historical Fiction. Sugarland shifts to Prohibition-era Chicago, where jazz pianist Eve Riser gets pulled into a disappearance and the city's bootlegging world.

Her later books keep putting women with limited options at the center of the action. The Underground River, published as The Floating Theatre in the United Kingdom and Europe, follows a seamstress working on an Ohio River theater boat in 1838. The Physician's Daughter moves to the months after the Civil War, when Vita Tenney fights for the chance to study medicine instead of accepting the future her father has chosen for her.

Sisters, family loyalty, survival, and the price of independence are recurring concerns in Conway's novels. Her characters often face rules that seem fixed, whether those rules come from family, money, war, or the expectations placed on women. She gives them hard choices rather than easy escapes.

Her short fiction has appeared in journals including The Iowa Review, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, and The Carolina Quarterly. She has also received a California Arts Council fellowship in Creative Writing and has reviewed fiction.

Conway lives in San Francisco with her family and a much-loved lumpy dog. Alongside writing novels, she teaches creative writing through Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program. Her more recent novel, We Meet Apart, brings her interest in sisters, history, Ireland, and the unexplained into a World War II story set across two possible realities.