Molly Green Books in Order

If you’re drawn to home-front stories and orphanages: An Orphan in the Snow → An Orphan’s War → An Orphan’s Wish
If you love family sagas about sisters: A Sister’s Courage → A Sister’s Song → A Sister’s War
If you want to focus on Bletchley Park and codebreaking: Wartime at Bletchley Park → Winter at Bletchley Park → Wartime Wishes at Bletchley Park
If you prefer stand-alone wartime romances: Courage for the Cabinet Girl → The Wartime Librarian’s Secret

Molly Green is the historical saga pen name of British writer Denise Barnes, who has turned a life of travel, odd jobs and late-career reinvention into a string of warm, detailed novels about women living through the Second World War.

She grew up in Norfolk and left home eager to see more of the world. Over the years she sold lipstick in a Denver department store, modelled in Atlanta, worked for the UN Narcotics Director in Geneva, chauffeured a Swiss lawyer in Zurich and cooked as a vegetarian chef in a Bavarian sanatorium.

Those jobs gave her a store of stories and people to draw on. Her first book, the memoir From Bad to Wurst: Bavarian Adventures of a Veggie Cook, grew directly out of the chaos and comedy of that time in Germany.

Back in England she trained as an estate agent and eventually built her own chain of offices in Kent. Selling that business to the wrong buyers led to a bruising legal battle and another non-fiction book, Seller Beware: How Not to Sell Your Business, which unpicked the experience in plain, practical detail.

Fiction, though, was always the real goal. Writing under the name Fenella Forster she published the sweeping Voyagers trilogy, then, as Molly Green, she began a new chapter with historical sagas set on the British home front in the 1940s.

Her first Molly Green novels follow staff and children at a Dr Barnardo’s orphanage in wartime Liverpool. In books such as An Orphan in the Snow, An Orphan’s War and An Orphan’s Wish she writes about women who carry private grief into demanding, badly paid work, and find purpose in protecting bombed-out children who have even less than they do.

Next came The Victory Sisters trilogy, which tracks the Linfoot sisters as each finds her own way to serve. One becomes a pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary in A Sister’s Courage, another sings with a swing band for troops in A Sister’s Song, and the youngest works the canals moving vital cargo in A Sister’s War.

More recently she has turned to the secret worlds of wartime intelligence and government. The Bletchley Park Girls books, including Wartime at Bletchley Park and its sequels, follow young women recruited to crack codes in cold, cramped huts. Later stand-alones like Courage for the Cabinet Girl and The Wartime Librarian’s Secret move underground into Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms and out to country houses turned into hospitals and schools.

Across all these stories she is drawn to ordinary women doing unusual jobs, from pilots and codebreakers to canal boat crews and librarians. Her research often starts with memoirs and site visits, then narrows to the small daily details of cold tea, thin stockings and endless shifts that make the big historical moments feel lived in.

Barnes now lives in the south of England and writes full time, often from a converted railway carriage or cabin in her garden with a rescued cat for company. Whether she is writing about an orphanage in Liverpool or a code room under Whitehall, her books keep circling the same territory, the quiet courage it takes to keep going when the world is on fire and the unexpected communities that form in hard times.