Martha Waters Books in Order

Martha Waters grew up in South Florida and later went north to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. England, history, and romantic comedies were already big interests long before she published a novel, and those three things still shape a lot of what she writes.

At UNC, she majored in history and international studies. For a while, she thought her future might be in foreign service or nonprofit work abroad, but a children's literature class during her senior year sent her in a different direction.

She went on to study library science and became a children's librarian.

That bookish job fits neatly with the rest of her story. Waters had always wanted to write, and for years she tried to make YA fantasy work. In late graduate school, a class on genre fiction led her to romance, and once she started reading writers like Julia Quinn she realized she had found the form that suited her best.

Romance gave her more room for the things she most liked putting on the page: conversation, chemistry, friendship, and people making a mess of their feelings. Her first romance attempt became To Have and to Hoax, the 2020 novel that introduced her Regency Vows series.

From there she built out a whole circle of interconnected love stories. To Love and to Loathe, To Marry and to Meddle, To Swoon and to Spar, and To Woo and to Wed all return to Regency England, but each book takes a slightly different angle on courtship, class, and comic disaster. Readers who enjoy banter, meddling friends, fake engagements, marriages of convenience, and second chances usually feel right at home.

She likes a strong setup and then lets the characters get in their own way.

That mix of wit and feeling carries into her later books too. Christmas Is All Around shifts into contemporary holiday romance, with London settings and a former child star at its center. And Then There Was the One moves to 1930s England and folds a murder mystery into the love story. Spellstruck heads into alternate 1920s London, where banned magic, enchanted cocktails, and a brewing political fight sit alongside the romance.

Across all of these books, some patterns keep showing up. Waters likes social worlds with lots of rules, whether that means the marriage market, a famous family home, or a village where everyone knows everyone else's business. She is also drawn to prickly, funny characters who talk around what they want until they finally cannot anymore. Even when the setting changes, the pleasures are familiar: sharp dialogue, strong supporting casts, and a real affection for England and the stories people tell about it.

She has said she works best in the morning, and her writing life has existed alongside library work and other part-time jobs. Now she lives in London, which feels like a fitting home base for a writer so drawn to British settings. The librarian's instinct still seems present too, in the care she brings to research and in the sense that books are not just stories for her, but a place to happily linger.