Paullina Simons Books in Order
Browse all Paullina Simons books in order, with lists, summaries, background on The Bronze Horseman and End of Forever, plus tips on where to start.
Last updated: December 19, 2025
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Publication Order
20 books
Light at Lavelle
by Paullina Simons
2023
In 1929 Ukraine, young farmer Isabelle Lazar fights to protect her family as Soviet power tightens and famine looms. Forced to flee alone to America, she lands in Boston and crosses paths with Finn Evans, a wealthy banker whose life is about to be shattered by the Great Depression.
The Tiger Catcher
by Paullina Simons
2019
Julian lives a charmed life in Los Angeles until he falls headlong for Josephine, a magnetic young woman with dangerous secrets. When tragedy rips them apart, a mysterious stranger offers Julian a way to find her again—if he is willing to risk everything, even time itself.
Inexpressible Island
by Paullina Simons
2019
Inexpressible Island concludes the End of Forever saga as Julian nears the end of his strength and his bargains with destiny. Locked in a final battle against a dark force that stalks him and Josephine, he must decide what, if anything, he is still willing to lose.
A Beggar's Kingdom
by Paullina Simons
2019
In the second End of Forever novel, Julian has already lost Josephine once and refuses to let fate have the final word. Chasing her across new eras and identities, he faces ruthless enemies and impossible choices that demand ever greater sacrifices for one more chance at love.
Poppet Gets Two Big Brothers
by Paullina Simons
2015
Poppet once thought she was the center of her parents’ world, until two boisterous brothers arrive and seem to steal all of Mum’s attention. As they dress up, paint and play together, she discovers that sharing her family can make life bigger and more fun.
Lone Star
by Paullina Simons
2015
Just weeks before college, Chloe leaves Maine for a backpacking trip across Europe with her boyfriend and two friends, aiming for Barcelona. A detour through Eastern Europe and a meeting with charming drifter Johnny turn the holiday into a haunting journey through history, first love and betrayal.
I Love My Baby Because…
by Paullina Simons
2014
This gentle picture book follows a mother and her toddler through a busy day of getting dressed, shopping, baking, playing and bedtime snuggles. Every chaotic moment becomes another reason she loves her baby, celebrating the messy, joyful routines of early childhood.
Bellagrand
by Paullina Simons
2014
Bellagrand continues Gina and Harry’s story as their marriage spans four turbulent decades and two continents. Gina longs for family and stability; Harry is consumed by radical politics. Their choices carry them from immigrant mill towns to a mysterious Florida estate, where love and ideals collide with devastating consequences.
Six Days in Leningrad
by Paullina Simons
2013
In this memoir, Paullina Simons returns to Leningrad with her father after decades in America, retracing the city of her childhood while researching The Bronze Horseman. Over six intense days they confront family history, the scars of war and the strange, painful work of going home again.
Children of Liberty
by Paullina Simons
2012
At the turn of the twentieth century, fourteen‑year‑old Gina Attaviano arrives from Sicily at Boston’s docks dreaming of freedom and fortune. She falls for reserved Harvard man Harry Barrington, despite class, age and family expectations, beginning the complicated love story that lies behind The Bronze Horseman.
A Song in the Daylight
by Paullina Simons
2009
From the outside, Larissa Stark has everything: a devoted husband, children she loves, a beautiful New Jersey home. A chance encounter with a younger stranger cracks that picture, pulling her into an affair that will carry her from suburbia to Manila and the Australian outback and force her to reckon with the cost of following a divided heart.
Tatiana's Table
by Paullina Simons
2007
Tatiana’s Table is a warm, story‑filled companion to the Bronze Horseman novels, blending recipes with letters, scenes and memories from Tatiana and Alexander’s life. From Soviet‑style comfort food to American feasts, it lets readers linger in their kitchen between the battles.
Road to Paradise
by Paullina Simons
2007
Summer 1981 finds Shelby Sloane driving her new yellow Mustang from New York to California to search for the mother who left her. With old friend Gina and runaway hitchhiker Candy along for the ride, a carefree road trip turns dark, testing loyalty, courage and first love.
The Summer Garden
by Paullina Simons
2005
Years of war have finally brought Tatiana and Alexander to America, where they try to turn survival into a real marriage and home. In the uneasy early days of the Cold War, ghosts of the past and new dangers threaten their hard‑won peace and the son they adore.
The Girl in Times Square
by Paullina Simons
2004
Lily Quinn is struggling to finish college and pay the rent in New York City when her roommate and best friend vanishes. As Lily works with jaded detective Spencer O’Malley to search for Amy, buried family secrets and a personal crisis upend everything she thought she knew about her own life.
Tatiana and Alexander
by Paullina Simons
2003
Separated by an ocean and a brutal regime, Tatiana rebuilds a fragile life in America with her young son while Alexander is trapped in the Soviet war machine, facing prison and betrayal. Each of them fights, in very different ways, for a chance to be together again.
The Bronze Horseman
by Paullina Simons
2000
In June 1941, as Germany invades the Soviet Union, sheltered teenager Tatiana Metanova meets Red Army officer Alexander Belov on a hot Leningrad afternoon. Their forbidden love must survive the siege of the city, starvation, secrets and the crushing demands of war.
Eleven Hours
by Paullina Simons
1998
On the eve of giving birth to her third child, Didi Wood slips out to a Dallas mall and never comes home. As her husband and the FBI race to find her, Didi endures an eleven‑hour nightmare that tests her courage, sanity and will to survive.
Red Leaves
by Paullina Simons
1996
At Dartmouth College, charismatic basketball star Kristina Kim is found dead in the snow days after anyone last saw her. Detective Spencer O’Malley, who met her only once, digs into the lives of her three closest friends and uncovers a tangle of obsession, privilege and betrayal.
Tully
by Paullina Simons
1994
Tully Makker grows up on the wrong side of town in Kansas, surviving a violent home and clinging fiercely to her two friends. As love, betrayal and tragedy reshape their lives from the 1970s onward, Tully fights to build a future she can claim as her own.
Where should I start?
If you want epic historical romance: The Bronze Horseman → Tatiana and Alexander → The Summer Garden
If you prefer intense contemporary drama: Tully → The Girl in Times Square
If you like twisty suspense: Red Leaves → Eleven Hours
If time-bending love stories appeal to you: The Tiger Catcher → A Beggar's Kingdom → Inexpressible Island
If you want the full Bronze Horseman backstory: Children of Liberty → Bellagrand → The Bronze Horseman
Author bio
Paullina Simons was born in 1963 in Leningrad, in what was then the Soviet Union, and grew up in a cramped communal apartment shared with parents, relatives and constant conversation. As a child she walked the same streets that later became the backdrop of The Bronze Horseman, already imagining stories even while real history pressed in on everyday life.
Her father was a civil lawyer and her mother an engineer, determined to carve out some stability in a system that distrusted them. When her father was arrested for speaking against the regime, the risk of saying the wrong thing stopped being abstract and became part of the family’s daily weather.
At ten, after years of uncertainty, she left Leningrad with her parents for the United States, trading icy courtyards for the noise of Queens and, later, the wide‑open skies of Kansas.
Learning English was its own migration. Simons has spoken about listening more than she talked, filling notebooks with strange new words until she could shape a story in this second language. By twelve she had finished an early novella in English, proof that the urge to write had survived the move even if almost everything else in her life had changed.
She attended colleges in New York, Kansas and England, graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in political science. Before publishing fiction she worked a string of jobs—translator, tour guide, financial journalist for a business news network, even television producer—watching how people talked about money, power and hope in very different cities.
Writing never let go. While working and raising a young family, Simons began the manuscript that became Tully, a novel about a fierce, damaged Kansas girl who clings to friendship as she stumbles through love, loss, bad decisions and the long, uneven climb toward adulthood.
Published in 1994, Tully was translated into many languages and introduced readers around the world to her big‑canvas storytelling. She followed it with Red Leaves, a darkly twisty mystery about four Ivy League friends and the detective who unpicks their loyalties, and Eleven Hours, an almost real‑time thriller about a pregnant woman abducted from a Dallas shopping mall. Later standalones such as The Girl in Times Square, Road to Paradise and A Song in the Daylight keep circling the same obsessions: how ordinary people live with grief, temptation and the consequences of the secrets they keep.
The books that made her name for many readers are the novels of The Bronze Horseman universe, which follow Tatiana Metanova and Alexander Belov from the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union through the siege of Leningrad, wartime separation and the long work of building a life afterward. To understand that history from the inside, Simons travelled back to St Petersburg with her father, a journey she later described in her memoir Six Days in Leningrad.
More recently she has written the time‑bending End of Forever trilogy, in which lovers chase each other across lifetimes, as well as prequels Children of Liberty and Bellagrand, picture books such as I Love My Baby Because…, and the historical epic Light at Lavelle.
Simons now lives near New York City with her husband Kevin Ryan and their four children, Natasha, Misha, Kevin Jr and Tatiana, named after her unforgettable heroine. From that home base she keeps returning, on the page, to the places that shaped her, writing about love and survival in languages and landscapes that once seemed impossibly far from a Soviet childhood.
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