Below is the complete list of Susan Mallery’s Blackberry Island books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Blackberry Island Books
About Blackberry Island
Susan Mallery’s Blackberry Island series is a contemporary women’s fiction and romance sequence set around a fictional island community in Washington State, where friendship, family tension, old wounds, and second chances matter as much as romantic love. The series begins with Barefoot Season and originally formed a three-book arc with Three Sisters and Evening Stars, before Mallery later returned to the setting with Sisters by Choice and The Happiness Plan. Together, the books show a slightly different side of Mallery from her larger Fool’s Gold romances: more intimate, more family-centered, and often more focused on women rebuilding themselves than on a single courtship plot.
Barefoot Season introduces Blackberry Island through the Blackberry Island Inn and the damaged friendship between Michelle Sanderson and Carly Williams. Michelle returns from military service physically and emotionally wounded, only to confront the inn, the past, and the friend she once lost. Carly has her own grievances and survival instincts, and the novel’s emotional force comes from the slow repair of trust between women who have hurt each other and still need each other. Romance is present, but the central relationship is friendship under strain.
Three Sisters broadens the island into a neighborhood story, focusing on three women connected by houses, proximity, and private crisis rather than blood. Andi, Deanna, and Boston each carry a different kind of dissatisfaction: betrayal, perfectionism, grief, self-protection, or the collapse of what life was supposed to become. The “sisters” of the title are chosen rather than biological, which fits one of Mallery’s most durable themes. Female friendship becomes a structure strong enough to challenge isolation, marriage trouble, and the shame people feel when their lives look less perfect than expected.
Evening Stars turns the series toward actual sisters, centering on Nina Wentworth and the family obligations that have shaped her life. Nina has spent years acting like the responsible one, sacrificing her own ambitions while her mother and sister move more freely through life. The novel uses romance and family drama to ask what happens when caretaking becomes identity, and whether a woman can claim happiness without feeling she has abandoned everyone who depends on her.
The later Blackberry Island novels expand the setting beyond that first closely linked trio. Sisters by Choice follows cousins raised like sisters and emphasizes reinvention, business, resentment, loyalty, and the complicated bond between women who know one another too well. The Happiness Plan continues the series’ interest in friendship, family friction, and women at emotional crossroads, using the island as a place where old assumptions can be tested and rewritten.
Reading the Blackberry Island books in publication order gives the strongest sense of the community’s growth. The individual novels can often stand alone because each focuses on a distinct set of relationships, but the order preserves the way Mallery develops the island from one inn and one broken friendship into a broader emotional landscape of families, neighbors, cousins, and friends.
The series works because Blackberry Island is not presented as a perfect refuge. It is a beautiful, close community, but closeness can expose disappointment as easily as it offers comfort. Mallery uses the setting to explore the kind of healing that happens through ordinary persistence: conversations, apologies, shared work, changed expectations, and the courage to want more after years of settling for less. At its best, the Blackberry Island series is about women learning that starting over does not always mean leaving. Sometimes it means finally being honest in the place that already knows your history.