Below is the complete list of Philippa Gregory’s Fairmile books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Fairmile Books
About Fairmile
Philippa Gregory’s Fairmile series is a multigenerational historical saga that begins in seventeenth-century England and expands across the Atlantic world. The sequence follows members of the Reekie family through civil war, political upheaval, poverty, commerce, slavery, colonial ambition, and the changing opportunities available to women and outsiders. Beginning with Tidelands, the series differs from Gregory’s royal-court fiction by focusing less on queens and dynastic succession and more on people living at the edges of power who must navigate the consequences of decisions made by rulers far above them.
Tidelands introduces Alinor Reekie in 1648, during the English Civil War. Alinor is a poor woman living in the Sussex tidelands, trying to support her family after her husband disappears. Her knowledge of herbs and healing gives her a useful role in the community but also leaves her vulnerable to suspicion in a period when women who seem unusual or independent can easily be accused of witchcraft.
Her life changes when she encounters James, a young Catholic priest and royalist conspirator. Their relationship develops against a country divided between Parliament and the monarchy, but Gregory keeps the political conflict grounded in daily consequences: food, work, reputation, religion, marriage, and survival. Alinor has little formal power, yet the choices surrounding her can determine whether her family rises, falls, or survives at all.
The second novel, Dark Tides, moves the story forward and broadens its geography. The Reekie family becomes connected to London, Venice, and colonial New England, allowing Gregory to explore trade, migration, religious communities, and the widening commercial networks of the seventeenth century. The family is no longer confined to the marshes where the story began, but the consequences of earlier choices remain important.
This expansion also shifts attention toward the next generation. Alys, Alinor’s daughter, becomes increasingly central, while new relationships and ambitions draw the family into very different social worlds. Gregory uses these transitions to show how one generation’s struggle for basic survival can create opportunities—and new dangers—for the next.
Dawnlands continues the family story into the political crisis surrounding James II and the Monmouth Rebellion. The series by this point is operating on a much larger historical scale, but Gregory maintains the Reekies as the emotional center. Political revolutions, religious conflict, and colonial expansion matter because they alter the lives of people who have no guarantee that history will treat them kindly.
One of the strongest features of Fairmile is its interest in mobility. Characters cross class boundaries, national borders, and oceans, but social advancement is never presented as straightforward progress. Wealth can be built through exploitation, colonial opportunity can depend on dispossession, and the expansion of trade ties the family to systems that include slavery and coercion.
The series also gives Gregory space to explore women whose power does not come from royalty. Alinor, Alys, and later women in the family must work through knowledge, business, marriage, reputation, and sheer persistence rather than titles. Their choices can still shape generations, even when the legal and political systems around them deny them formal authority.
Publication order is the natural way to read the series because the Fairmile story is cumulative. Children grow into adults, family fortunes change, relationships established in one book shape the next, and the geographical scope widens as the Reekies move outward from Sussex.
At its core, Fairmile is a saga about survival becoming ambition. The family begins in poverty at the margins of English society and gradually becomes entangled with commerce, empire, and political change. Gregory uses that progression to show how ordinary families are swept into history—and how, once they acquire more power, they must also confront the moral cost of what that power makes possible.