Wilderness (Elizabeth Harris) Books in Order

The Wilderness series follows a group of friends and families across years of love, loss, travel and difficult choices. It begins with A Good Man's Love, set against the upheaval of the late 1960s, and continues through Singing in the Wilderness and A Slight Folly. These are relationship novels, but the emotional story has room to breathe across countries, decades and changing family lives.

Grief changes everything.

In the first book, Hal Dillon and Ben MacAllister are shaken by the death of their friend Laurie. Their paths split. Hal goes to Mexico, where a relationship with Magdalena complicates his search for a new direction, while Ben travels to Cyprus and meets Jo Daniel. The story follows how these friendships and romances keep echoing after people return to England and try to build ordinary lives.

Jo becomes one of the series' key figures. She has known loss and has learned how difficult it can be to start over without losing yourself in the process. In Singing in the Wilderness, family life with Hal and their children is strained by work, resentment and the parts of herself Jo has put aside. The books are interested in the everyday weight of a relationship: home, children, money, memory, attraction and the question of whether two people can honestly meet each other again.

By A Slight Folly, old decisions have reached further than anyone expected. Hal and Jo must face the effects of past betrayals on their marriage, children and wider family. Other characters get their own chances to change course, which gives the final book a broader view of people attempting new beginnings as one era draws to a close.

The title fits the series well. Wilderness can mean Mexico, Cyprus, Crete, a remote English coast or simply the private territory of grief and uncertainty. Harris uses travel and landscape to show people out of their usual routines, where they have to admit what they want and what they have lost. The stories are more concerned with emotional consequences than neat answers.

Start with A Good Man's Love and read in order. The books work best as a continuing saga because each one builds on friendships, family ties and choices made much earlier.