Below is the complete list of Kristina McMorris books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
Publication Order of Collections Books
with Tammy Greenwood
Publication Order of Children’s Books
Publication Order of Good Intentions Books
Publication Order of Tammy Greenwood Collections Books
with Tammy Greenwood
About Kristina McMorris
Kristina McMorris is an American historical novelist whose fiction frequently begins with an overlooked photograph, family document, little-known episode, or uncomfortable corner of history and develops it into an intimate story about people living through extraordinary circumstances. A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author, she is particularly known for Sold on a Monday, The Ways We Hide, and Letters from Home. Her novels span the World Wars, the Great Depression, Japanese American incarceration, immigration, organized crime, and other periods when personal identity could be profoundly affected by forces beyond an individual’s control.
McMorris did not begin her professional life as a novelist. As a child she spent five years hosting an award-winning children’s television program, and she later worked in acting, event planning, television hosting, public relations, and magazine writing. She earned a degree in international marketing from Pepperdine University, with a concentration in multiple languages. That varied background preceded the discovery that eventually redirected her career toward historical fiction.
While assembling a family cookbook in 2001, McMorris came across letters her grandfather had written to her grandmother while serving in the Navy during World War II. The correspondence inspired Letters from Home, her 2011 debut novel. Set in 1944, it follows young women navigating friendship, romance, uncertainty, and separation while American servicemen are overseas. The personal origin of the book established a pattern that has remained important in McMorris’s writing: large historical events are most compelling to her when viewed through private lives and relationships.
Her subsequent novels broadened both the geography and historical subjects of her work. Bridge of Scarlet Leaves explores the consequences of Pearl Harbor and the incarceration of Japanese Americans through an interracial marriage, a subject with added resonance given McMorris’s own Japanese heritage. The Pieces We Keep combines historical and contemporary threads, while The Edge of Lost moves through immigration, Prohibition-era America, and the mysteries surrounding Alcatraz.
Sold on a Monday became the defining commercial success of her career. Inspired by a real Depression-era newspaper photograph of children offered for sale, the novel follows a reporter whose decision to photograph a desperate family produces consequences far beyond the story he hoped to publish. The book became a million-copy bestseller and spent months on the New York Times bestseller list, considerably expanding McMorris’s readership.
She returned to World War II with The Ways We Hide, whose heroine uses skills developed through illusion and stagecraft after being recruited for intelligence work. McMorris also joined Susan Meissner and Ariel Lawhon for When We Had Wings, an interwoven novel about American military nurses serving in the Pacific during the war. These books reflect her continuing interest in women whose wartime contributions occurred outside conventional battlefield narratives.
Her 2025 novel The Girls of Good Fortune moves further back in time to Portland, Oregon, in 1888. Its heroine, Celia, is a half-Chinese woman passing as white amid severe anti-Chinese prejudice who awakens imprisoned beneath the city and must reconstruct the events leading to her abduction. The novel combines historical suspense with questions of race, identity, survival, and the dangers attached to belonging to more than one world.
Across McMorris’s bibliography, history is rarely presented as a procession of famous names and events. Her attention remains with people whose choices are constrained by war, poverty, prejudice, family obligation, or secrets they cannot safely reveal. That combination of research, suspense, emotional intimacy, and forgotten history gives her novels their recognizable character, even as their periods and settings change substantially from one book to the next.