Martha Hall Kelly Books in Order

Martha Hall Kelly grew up in Massachusetts, and her New England roots still shape the places and histories she returns to in her fiction. Her mother’s Smith family settled on Martha’s Vineyard in 1891, and the island’s past later gave her material for a novel of her own.

She studied journalism at Syracuse University and Northwestern University, then spent many years working as an advertising copywriter. Kelly has said that, before her first novel, advertising was the only kind of writing she had done. Her path into fiction came after a long professional life, not as an early-career plan.

The story that pulled her in began with a magazine article and a visit to a Connecticut house.

In 2000, Kelly visited the former home of Caroline Ferriday, the Bellamy-Ferriday House in Bethlehem, Connecticut. She had been carrying around an article about Ferriday, a socialite, actress, and philanthropist who helped Polish women who survived Ravensbrück concentration camp. Kelly left the property with a small lilac cutting, planted it at home, and began looking for more of Ferriday’s story.

That search became the foundation for Lilac Girls. Kelly spent close to ten years researching, working through Ferriday’s archives, traveling to Poland, Germany, and France, and speaking with survivors and people who had known Ferriday. She also had nearly one hundred of Ferriday’s French letters translated. The work gave her both the historical frame and the human details for a novel about war, survival, and the people who chose to help.

It took a long time to get there.

Lilac Girls arrived in 2016 and became a New York Times bestseller in its first week. The novel follows Caroline, Polish teenager and resistance courier Kasia Kuzmerick, and German doctor Herta Oberheuser as World War II changes each of their lives. It established the approach Kelly has continued to use: several women’s viewpoints, real history at the edges of the plot, and personal choices made under pressure.

Kelly then went backward through the Ferriday and Woolsey family history. Lost Roses centers on Caroline’s mother, Eliza, as World War I and the Russian Revolution upend the lives of Eliza, her friend Sofya, and Varinka, a young woman from the Russian countryside. Sunflower Sisters moves to the Civil War, following Caroline’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, an aspiring Union nurse, alongside Jemma, an enslaved young woman seeking freedom, and Anne-May, a plantation mistress with dangerous ambitions.

Her later novels continue her interest in women facing the fallout of war. The Golden Doves follows two former French Resistance spies pursuing a Nazi doctor in the 1950s. The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club connects a present-day search for family answers with two sisters trying to hold their island farm together during World War II. Across these books, friendship, family loyalty, hidden histories, and the costs of courage keep returning.

More than two million copies of Kelly’s books have been sold, and her work has been translated in fifty countries. She lives in Litchfield, Connecticut, and Hobe Sound, Florida, while Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Martha’s Vineyard remain important parts of the world behind her stories.