Sally Gunning Books in Order

If you want her Cape Cod historical trilogy: The Widow's War → Bound → The Rebellion of Jane Clarke
If you want a standalone about famous American families: Benjamin Franklin's Bastard → Monticello
If you want a later New England novel about art and reinvention: Painting the Light
If you want her mystery side first: Hot Water → Under Water → Ice Water

Sally Gunning was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1951, and she has spent her life in New England. Her family roots in Brewster on Cape Cod go back centuries, which helps explain why so much of her fiction feels tied to place, weather, work, and the long memory of local history.

She came to writing early, mostly because she loved reading so much that one rainy day she ran out of books.

As a girl she moved from Dr. Seuss to The Catcher in the Rye, and the urge to tell stories stuck. The writing career itself came later. After graduating from the University of Rhode Island, she worked a string of jobs, including museum tour guide, cruise ship stewardess, bank accountant, and office manager for a country doctor.

That doctor's decision to take one extra day off each week changed things. Gunning turned the day into writing time, shut herself in with a typewriter, and taught herself how to build a novel. What she expected to be practice work became the start of a long run in print.

Her first decade as a novelist was spent in mystery. The Peter Bartholomew books, beginning with Hot Water, follow an odd-job entrepreneur on a fictional Cape flavored island called Nashtoba, where ordinary errands keep turning into murder cases. Pete's uneasy connection to his ex-wife Connie gives the series a steady human thread, and the books already show what Gunning does well: close communities, buried grudges, and people whose pasts do not stay buried for long.

Then she turned toward the deeper past under her own feet.

Living in Brewster, walking old roads, and digging into local and family history pulled her toward historical fiction. That shift produced the Satucket novels, The Widow's War, Bound, and The Rebellion of Jane Clarke, books set on Cape Cod in the years before the American Revolution. Gunning often centers women who are boxed in by law, custom, or family, then shows how they push back, sometimes quietly, sometimes at real personal cost.

She later widened her scope while keeping that same interest in overlooked corners of American history. Benjamin Franklin's Bastard imagines the family drama around Benjamin Franklin and his son William. Monticello looks at Martha Jefferson Randolph and the world around Thomas Jefferson. Painting the Light, set on Martha's Vineyard in 1898, follows a woman trying to rebuild her life after loss and disappointment. Readers who like family tension, moral gray areas, and a strong sense of time and place usually find a lot to hold onto in those books.

Across her work, the same concerns keep returning: New England landscapes, the texture of daily labor, the limits placed on women, and the uneasy gap between public history and private life. She has also served the history of her town directly, creating local history tours, serving as president of the Brewster Historical Society, and becoming a fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Her essays and commentary have appeared in major newspapers and literary outlets as well.

She still lives in Brewster with her husband. It seems like the right place for a writer who keeps asking what happened here before we arrived, and what those old stories still have to say.