S Block Books in Order

If you want the main Home Fires saga in novel form: Keep the Home Fires Burning → A Woman's War → A Woman's Courage.
If you prefer the original four-part ebook serial: Spitfire Down! → A Woman's Work → Strangers Among Us → A Soldier Returns.
If you're coming from the TV series: start with Keep the Home Fires Burning, then continue with A Woman's War and A Woman's Courage.
If you just want to sample the world: try Spitfire Down! as a short introduction to Great Paxford and its Women's Institute.

S Block is the pen name of British screenwriter and novelist Simon Block, whose work moves between television drama and wartime sagas set on the home front. Born in London and still based there with his family, he has spent much of his career telling stories about ordinary people under extraordinary pressure.

Before writing full-time, Block held an eclectic mix of jobs, from working as an elephant keeper at London Zoo to driving a London bus. Alongside his writing he has long been involved with the Samaritans, and has served as director of the North London branch, work that keeps him close to real, everyday anxieties and small acts of kindness.

He first came to wider attention in the mid-1990s with his play Not a Game for Boys, a sharp comedy about three cab drivers clinging to a local table tennis league as their escape from the rest of life. Premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in 1995 and later revived in London, the play already showed his knack for tight settings, quick dialogue and characters who reveal more than they intend.

Television soon became his main canvas. Block went on to write for a string of popular British dramas, including New Tricks, Lewis, Wire in the Blood, Hotel Babylon and The Inspector Lynley Mysteries. He also wrote the factual drama The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, about a young British photography student shot in Gaza, which was shortlisted for a British Academy Television Award for best single drama.

That interest in real lives under historical pressure runs through later projects such as the BBC film The Eichmann Show, about the televised trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, and The Windermere Children, which follows child Holocaust survivors sent to the English Lake District at the end of the war. The Windermere story in particular drew wide praise, winning a major European television prize and bringing Block another BAFTA nomination.

For many readers, though, Block's defining work is the period drama Home Fires. Inspired by Julie Summers's non-fiction book about the Women's Institute during the Second World War, the series is set in the fictional Cheshire village of Great Paxford and follows the women who keep the community going while the men are away. As creator and lead writer, Block shaped twelve episodes that mix rationing, air-raid sirens and village politics with friendship, humour and complicated marriages.

When the television series was cancelled after two seasons, he wasn't quite ready to leave Great Paxford behind. Writing as S Block, he continued the story in prose with Keep the Home Fires Burning, first released as a four-part ebook serial and later as a complete novel. The book returns to familiar characters like Frances Barden, Pat Simms, Steph Farrow and Teresa Lucas as a crashed plane, factory closures and long-buried secrets force the village to pull together yet again.

He then carried the saga deeper into the war with A Woman's War and A Woman's Courage. These novels push beyond the early war years into heavier bombing, prisoner-of-war camps and the strain of separation, but they always come back to kitchens, farms and church halls where the real work of endurance takes place. Readers tend to respond to the balance he strikes between the sweep of history and the private battles over marriage, grief, new love and the desire for a different life after the war ends.

Across plays, films, television and novels, Block's stories share a few constants: tight communities, moral grey areas and women whose strength is often underestimated. From his home in London he continues to move between screen and page, writing about people who might live just down the road but who, when pushed, discover reserves of courage they never expected to need.