Palessa Books in Order

Palessa was born in Jamaica on August 10 and grew up in Miami, Florida. That mix of Caribbean roots and South Florida energy shows up in her fiction, which moves easily between family drama, romance, and stories about women trying to make a life on their own terms. Her books are full of secrets, hard choices, and people who cannot quite outrun the past.

She started writing early. As a teenager, she kept diaries and wrote stories in whatever genre caught her attention. Then school and work pulled her in other directions, and writing slipped to the side for a while. Years later, after moving back to Jamaica in 2011, she decided she needed a major change and returned to fiction with more focus.

That shift turned into a publishing start.

Palessa has described herself as a former techie turned marketing analyst, and that practical side seems to matter to the way she works. She has said she sees writing as both a calling and a business, and she has spoken about using the marketing skills she built in her earlier career as she developed her books and her author brand. The result was her debut novel, Unchained Hearts, in 2013.

Unchained Hearts opens the Baxter Family Saga, a romance driven by old wounds, hidden history, and the pull of a powerful South Florida family. The books that follow, Portrait of Gray and Story of Us, widen that world. One digs into addiction, recovery, and redemption through Grayson Baxter. Another turns toward Washington politics, sacrifice, and the cost of protecting a family name. Readers who like sprawling relationship drama tend to find a lot to enjoy there.

Family pressure is one of her favorite engines.

Palessa did not stay in one lane for long. With Tobey Fine and Devereaux Cox, she moved into the Sacked & Tackled books, a sports romance series set around the Steinger Football League. These stories care about football, but they care even more about what happens off the field: bruised pride, ambition, reputation, and the mess people make when love and ego collide. The tone is contemporary, emotional, and full of tension between public image and private feeling.

Then she changed gears again.

Her historical novel Eyubea Girls shows another side of her work. Set in the early 1900s, it follows Lisbette Caldwell, a young woman pushed into marriage and taken to a small township in southern Africa, where she becomes involved in teaching girls whose futures seem already decided for them. Palessa has said the book began with the image of a young woman bringing her love of football to girls in Africa, but the deeper story that emerged was about survival, education, and a woman learning how to claim her own life.

Across all of these books, some patterns keep coming back. She likes love stories with pressure on them. She likes families with long memories. She likes characters who have to choose between comfort and truth, or between what the world expects and what they actually want. Even when the settings change from South Florida boardrooms to political Washington to semi-pro football circles or the Edwardian era, her stories stay close to emotional fallout and the effort it takes to start over.

These days Palessa lives in the mountains of western Jamaica. She has written about balancing books, marketing projects, and farm life, and about sharing that world with a lively collection of animals. It feels fitting. Her fiction may deal in glamour, scandal, and heartbreak, but there is also a grounded quality to it. She writes big feelings, yet she keeps her eye on the everyday choices that shape a life.