Patricia Harman Books in Order

If you want to start with Hope River: The Midwife of Hope River → The Reluctant Midwife → Once a Midwife → A Midwife's Song: Oh, Freedom!
If you like contemporary women's fiction: The Runaway Midwife
If you prefer real life memoir: The Blue Cotton Gown → Arms Wide Open
If you are choosing for young readers (~8-12): Lost on Hope Island → Lost on Hope Island 2 → Lost on Hope Island 3: Quarantine

Patricia Harman spent more than three decades catching babies before she ever thought of herself as an author. A certified nurse midwife, she built a life in Appalachia caring for women in exam rooms, cabins, and delivery suites, then turned that experience into memoirs, historical novels, and stories for young readers.

In her twenties and thirties she chased a back to the land dream. Harman lived on rural communes in Washington, Connecticut, Minnesota, and later on a ridge top farm in Roane County, West Virginia, where she and a circle of friends built log houses, dug a pond, raised food, and helped run a small natural foods cooperative.

Her path into midwifery started almost by accident, when a woman on one of those communes went into labor and Harman, the only person willing to stay calm and focused, found herself catching her first baby in a stranger's bedroom.

That first birth led to training with a collective of home birth midwives in Austin, Texas and to her role as a founding member of a cooperative of midwives in West Virginia. Wanting formal credentials, she later packed her young family and even the family cat into a battered trailer and headed to the University of Minnesota, where she earned a master's degree in nurse midwifery.

Over the next two decades Harman practiced as a nurse midwife on the faculties of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University, eventually joining her obstetrician gynecologist husband, Tom, in a busy private clinic in Morgantown. Together they ran a women's health practice that mixed routine checkups with high stakes deliveries, often for patients with few resources but plenty of stories.

When malpractice insurance costs made it impossible to keep delivering babies, she stepped back from birth work and began to write. Her first memoir, The Blue Cotton Gown, invites readers into a small West Virginia exam room where women talk frankly about pregnancy, illness, money, and marriage, while Harman struggles to keep the clinic and her own health afloat. Arms Wide Open reaches further back, tracing her commune years, early births, and the long road toward a sustainable, midwife centered life.

Fiction gave her another way to explore the same terrain. In The Midwife of Hope River and its sequels The Reluctant Midwife, Once a Midwife, and A Midwife's Song: Oh, Freedom!, she follows midwives and families in a small West Virginia town through the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the early civil rights era, blending birth stories with strikes, wars, and everyday neighborliness.

Her standalone novel The Runaway Midwife brings the profession into the present, sending a burned out midwife to a remote island community where she has to rebuild both her identity and her trust in other people, while the Lost on Hope Island books offer survival adventures for middle grade readers built around courage, cooperation, and a herd of helpful goats.

Harman still describes herself first as a midwife, even though she is now retired from clinical practice and writes full time. She lives with Tom in West Virginia, spends part of the year on a small island in Lake Erie, and has three grown sons. Through her books and frequent talks she continues to advocate for midwives, women's health, and the quiet power of ordinary people caring for one another.