Nancy Revell Books in Order

If you want the full wartime saga: The Shipyard Girls → Shipyard Girls at War → Secrets of the Shipyard Girls → Shipyard Girls in Love.
If you like to follow every character arc: Continue in order with Victory for the Shipyard Girls → Courage of the Shipyard Girls → Christmas with the Shipyard Girls → Triumph of the Shipyard Girls.
If you enjoy festive stories: Christmas with the Shipyard Girls → A Christmas Wish for the Shipyard Girls → Shipyard Girls Under the Mistletoe.
If you want the post war family saga: The Widow's Choice → A Secret in the Family.

Nancy Revell is the pen name of writer and journalist Amanda Revell Walton, who grew up in Sunderland in the north east of England and spent much of her career chasing stories for the national press. Before she turned to fiction, she wrote hard news and long human interest pieces, often drawing out the quieter details that made people's lives feel real on the page.

As a child she was a regular in her local libraries, moving between Sunderland and nearby Whitburn and devouring whatever she could find. After school she studied at Oxford University, then headed south to work first on a local paper and later for major newspapers, building a reputation for persistence and empathy.

Over more than two decades in journalism she covered everything from serious investigations to lighter features and true life stories for women's magazines. That mix of tough subjects and everyday domestic detail would later feed straight into her fiction, where big historical events sit alongside the ordinary worries of work, love and family.

Her pivot to novels began close to home. Revell comes from a long line of Sunderland shipyard workers, and while researching their history she discovered how many of the women who had taken on dangerous, heavy work during the world wars had slipped out of the public record. Their courage, and tragedies in her own family's past, convinced her that their stories deserved more space.

When she started writing what became The Shipyard Girls, she moved back to her hometown with her husband, Paul, and their English bull mastiff, Rosie, living within walking distance of the beaches at Roker and Seaburn and only a short way from where the novels are set. Immersed again in the sounds and weather of the river and yards, she set out to imagine the lives of the welders, riveters and crane drivers who kept the yards going while the men were away at war.

The first book was published in 2016 and grew into a twelve book saga that follows a group of women through the Second World War, from the early bombing raids to the hope and uncertainty of peace. Titles like Shipyard Girls in Love, Christmas with the Shipyard Girls and Three Cheers for the Shipyard Girls have regularly appeared in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, and the series has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Readers tend to talk about the same things: the sense of friendship, the working class detail and the feeling that these characters could have stepped out of old family photographs.

Rather than leave that world behind, Revell has followed some of her characters into the post war years with books such as The Widow's Choice and A Secret in the Family. Set around Cuthford Manor in County Durham, these novels look at what happens when women who once worked in noisy yards find themselves in grander surroundings, still dealing with secrets, grief and the pull of home.

Alongside the fiction, she has helped to push for a permanent public tribute to the real women who worked in Sunderland's shipyards, working with local groups and artists on a statue project. Her research process remains close to her journalistic roots, built on archives, interviews and an eye for everyday detail that can anchor a scene.

Today she writes two books a year and divides her time between the North East and other parts of England, but the river, yards and terraces of Sunderland are never far away in her imagination. When she talks about her work, she often comes back to the same aim: to tell stories that feel true to ordinary lives, and to give the shipyard girls and their families the recognition they did not always get in real time.