Shirley Dickson Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: The Orphan Sisters → Our Last Goodbye
If you like wartime friendship and found family: The Outcast Girls → The Lost Children
If you want one big secret at the heart of the story: The Orphan's Secret
If you want her main books in publication order: The Orphan Sisters → Our Last Goodbye → The Outcast Girls → The Lost Children → The Orphan's Secret

Shirley Dickson was born and grew up in South Shields, a seaside town in the northeast of England. That setting runs through her fiction for a reason. It is home ground, and the streets, shipyards, shelters, and family lives of the area clearly stayed with her.

She started young. At eleven she entered a short story competition in School Friend, and even though she did not win, the habit stuck. She has said she cannot remember a time when she was not writing.

She kept at it.

Dickson left school at fifteen, and for a long time that knocked her confidence. At eighteen she passed the entrance exam for nurse training, and nursing became a big part of her working life. She later retired from auxiliary nursing, but the practical, people-first side of that work never really left her, and you can feel it in the care she gives to ordinary lives under pressure.

For years she wrote poems and short stories while raising a family and getting on with work. There were plenty of rejection slips. She still went to workshops and conferences when she could, learned the craft bit by bit, and carried a novel in her head long before she had a published book in her hands.

The turning point came with The Orphan Sisters. Dickson has said the seed of that novel came from reading about a child abandoned in an orphanage, an image she could not shake. She wrote a draft years before publication, reworked it over time, entered it into the Romantic Novelists' Association New Writing Scheme, then had to set it aside for a while when family life took over. After retirement, with her children grown, she came back to the manuscript and decided it was now or never. The book was published in 2019 and became a bestseller.

Most of Dickson's novels live on the World War II home front rather than the battlefield. The Orphan Sisters follows Etty and Dorothy, two sisters abandoned at Blakely Hall. Our Last Goodbye turns to May Robinson, who trains as a nurse in wartime South Shields while carrying a secret that could break her family. The Outcast Girls brings together Sandra, shaped by an English orphanage, and Frieda, a Jewish girl sent out of Germany. In The Lost Children, twins Molly and Jacob cling to each other after evacuation and devastating loss. The Orphan's Secret centers on Lily and one split-second choice that changes a baby's life.

That mix of hardship and hope is really her lane.

Readers usually come to Shirley Dickson for emotion, but they stay for the people. Her books return again and again to abandoned children, sisters, mothers, nurses, working women, and people making impossible decisions in cramped houses, shelters, hospitals, and orphanages. Even when the stories are sad, there is usually a strong pull toward loyalty, decency, and the idea that a family can be remade.

She now lives in Northumberland with her husband, and has lived in the same house for more than forty years. She has three daughters, four grandchildren, and a lucky black cat. It sounds fitting. Her novels may deal with war, loss, and secrets, but they are also deeply interested in home.