Wartime Midwives Books in Order

The Wartime Midwives books are set at Mary Vale, a mother and baby home on the edge of the Lake District as the Second World War gathers force. Women arrive there because they are pregnant, unmarried, frightened, or simply out of options. Some want privacy. Some need shelter. Some are carrying grief as well as a child. Mary Vale offers refuge, but it is also shaped by the rules and judgments of its time.

That tension gives the series its backbone.

At the centre are the staff who try to make the place humane, especially Nurse Ada and Sister Anne in the earlier books, with other midwives and helpers joining the circle as the story goes on. Around them comes a changing cast of women from very different backgrounds, from waitresses and shipyard workers to socialites, refugees, war widows, Land Girls, and local mothers in trouble. Each book brings new personal stories, but the home itself gives the series continuity.

The setting matters because Mary Vale sits a little apart from the world, grand enough to feel imposing, remote enough to seem safe, and yet never fully cut off from the war. Bombing raids, shortages, missing fiances, army demands, illness, and local poverty all push their way through the doors. The books deal with childbirth, adoption, stigma, and survival, but they do it through relationships, women looking after one another, midwives improvising under pressure, and small acts of care that start to feel enormous.

The tone is warm and compassionate, though not sugar-coated. Styles does not forget how hard life could be for unmarried mothers in the 1940s, or how little control many women had over their futures. What keeps the series moving is the belief that kindness, practical help, and female solidarity can still create room to breathe.

By the later books, Mary Vale feels almost like a village in itself.

That is why the series is easy to sink into. The plots have tension, a threatened home, an outbreak of whooping cough, women forced into painful choices, but the deeper pull is emotional continuity. Readers return to see how the staff are coping, who needs help next, and how this fragile refuge will hold together. If you like wartime fiction that blends medical work, social history, and close-knit community, The Wartime Midwives, Home Fires and Spitfires, Keep Smiling Through, and A Mother's Love make a welcoming run of books.