Sara Donati Books in Order

If you want the full multi-generational saga:
Into the Wilderness → Dawn on a Distant Shore → Lake in the Clouds

If you prefer medical drama and Gilded Age New York:
The Gilded Hour → Where the Light Enters

If you enjoy literary fiction and short stories:
Homestead (written as Rosina Lippi)

Sara Donati is a name that promises readers a specific kind of journey—one filled with sprawling landscapes, complex history, and romance that feels genuine. However, the woman behind the name is actually Rosina Lippi. Before she became a bestselling author, she established herself as a linguistics professor with a deep curiosity about how people communicate.

Her own story began in Chicago, where she was born and raised. Yet, she didn't stay in the Midwest forever. In her younger years, she spent time exploring the wider world. This included a scholarship that took her to Austria, a trip that she considers a pivotal moment in her life.

Eventually, she returned to the United States to pursue serious academics. She earned a PhD from Princeton University and spent years teaching in university classrooms. But the pull of storytelling was always there.

Today, she has traded the lecture hall for a much quieter life. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, settled in the stunning, rugged area between Bellingham Bay and the Cascade Mountains. It is a place of mist, trees, and water, and she shares it with her husband, their daughter, and a constantly rotating lineup of family pets.

As a writer, she wears two different hats. Under her real name, Rosina Lippi, she writes contemporary and literary fiction. This work is highly acclaimed in its own right; her novel Homestead was awarded the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award. These stories tend to be quieter and more focused on the intimate details of community life.

But when she adopts the Sara Donati pen name, the canvas gets much bigger.

She created the Donati identity to write historical epics that span generations and continents. Her career as Donati began with a breakout hit, Into the Wilderness. This novel introduced the world to the Bonner family and the dangerous, beautiful frontier of New York in the 1790s. It was the start of the beloved Wilderness series, which is known for blending careful historical research with high-stakes adventure.

What keeps readers coming back, book after book, is her characters.

Donati writes about women who are ahead of their time. She isn't interested in damsels in distress. Instead, she gives us intelligent, resilient female protagonists who push against the rules of society. Sometimes, this means a spinster schoolteacher navigating the wild woods of the eighteenth century. Other times, she focuses on the struggles of female physicians trying to practice medicine in Gilded Age Manhattan. Her heroines are always carving out their own paths in a world that often tries to stop them.

Recently, she has worked to bridge the gap between her different storytelling eras. Her novel The Sweet Blue Distance serves as a western saga that connects the roots of the Bonner family to their descendants in later years.

It is a busy career, but she manages it from her quiet corner of the world. Far removed from the academic halls she once walked, she continues to weave stories that capture the imagination of readers everywhere.