The Victory Sisters Books in Order

The Victory Sisters books follow the three Linfoot sisters as they grow up on the Sussex coast and are pushed into very different wartime roles. Each novel focuses on one sister, but the others weave in and out, so you watch the family change over the course of the war.

In A Sister’s Courage, eldest sister Lorraine, known as Raine, is the girl who looks up every time a plane passes overhead. After tasting flight at a local airfield, she becomes determined to fly herself and persuades pilot Doug Williams to give her lessons. When war breaks out she joins the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying fighters and bombers from factories to front line squadrons, facing bad weather, hostile attitudes and the constant risk that the pilots she admires will not make it home.

Raine’s story mixes cockpit tension with the pull of first love and asks what it costs to chase a dream when the world is falling apart.

The second novel, A Sister’s Song, centres on Suzanne, whose careful plans to attend the Royal Academy of Music are derailed by the outbreak of war. Instead she joins a swing band that tours bomb damaged cities and overseas bases, singing for servicemen who might be gone tomorrow. Music becomes both a job and a lifeline as she finds confidence on stage, juggles friendships inside a close knit band and holds onto the hope of reuniting with the Navy officer who has her heart.

A Sister’s War follows the youngest sister, Ronnie, who is tired of being protected and wants to prove herself useful. Against her mother’s wishes she signs up with the Grand Union Canal Company and is sent to crew narrowboats carrying coal and other supplies between London and the Midlands. Life on the cut is physically hard, with cramped cabins, long days at the tiller and icy towpaths, but it also offers Ronnie comradeship, independence and a different way of seeing her country.

Taken together, the trilogy offers three distinct slices of wartime Britain, from airfields and dance halls to canals and cottage kitchens. Threaded through are letters home, family rows, small joys and the constant knowledge that any goodbye could be the last.

At its heart the series is about sisters learning who they are away from home and about how courage can look like piloting a Spitfire, stepping up to a microphone or simply steering a boat through the dark.