Below is the complete list of Martha Hall Kelly books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Caroline Ferriday / Lilac Girls Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Point In Time Books
About Martha Hall Kelly
Martha Hall Kelly is an American historical novelist best known for fiction that brings overlooked women and lesser-known episodes of twentieth-century history into the foreground. A New York Times bestselling author, she made her debut with Lilac Girls, a World War II novel inspired by American philanthropist Caroline Ferriday and the Polish women subjected to medical experiments at Ravensbrück concentration camp. Kelly has since expanded both backward and outward in history, writing about the American Civil War, the Russian Revolution, wartime resistance, postwar justice, and civilian life during World War II.
Born and raised in Massachusetts, Kelly studied journalism at Syracuse University and Northwestern University. Before becoming a novelist, she spent many years working as an advertising copywriter. Her transition into historical fiction began after a visit to the Bellamy-Ferriday House in Bethlehem, Connecticut, in 2000. There she encountered the story of Caroline Ferriday, who had worked after World War II to assist a group of Polish survivors of Ravensbrück known as the Rabbits because of the medical experiments performed on them.
That discovery eventually became Lilac Girls, published in 2016. Kelly structures the novel around three women on different sides of wartime Europe: Caroline Ferriday in the United States, Polish prisoner Kasia Kuzmerick, and German physician Herta Oberheuser. By combining fictional characters with historical figures, she created a form that would become central to her work—multiple female perspectives revealing how enormous political events affect individuals whose experiences are easily lost within conventional histories.
Kelly later turned Caroline Ferriday’s family history into a broader sequence. Lost Roses moves backward to World War I and the Russian Revolution, centering partly on Caroline’s mother, Eliza Ferriday, and her connections with Russian émigrés. Sunflower Sisters reaches further back to the American Civil War through Caroline’s great-grandmother, Georgeanna “Georgy” Woolsey, a Union nurse and abolitionist. Together, the novels create the Woolsey-Ferriday family saga across several generations, although each book has its own central characters and historical conflict.
Her research is a defining element of these novels. Kelly has drawn heavily on archives, family correspondence, photographs, diaries, museum collections, and travel to locations associated with her subjects. Rather than simply placing fictional characters beside famous events, she often begins with real women whose work or experiences have received less public attention and constructs the novel around the gaps left in the historical record.
The Golden Doves broadened that approach beyond the Ferriday family. Set partly during and after World War II, it follows two former resistance agents searching for justice against people connected to Nazi crimes. The novel combines espionage, postwar pursuit, friendship, and the disturbing history of programs that allowed some former Nazis to escape accountability.
Kelly returned to Massachusetts history with The Martha’s Vineyard Beach and Book Club. Inspired in part by her own maternal family, whose Smith ancestors settled on Martha’s Vineyard in the nineteenth century, the novel moves between World War II and a later generation uncovering family history. Its wartime story focuses on sisters, community, books, and island life during a period shaped by uncertainty and separation.
Across Kelly’s bibliography, women’s friendships and family connections are as important as the historical events surrounding them. Her novels repeatedly examine endurance, moral courage, displacement, and the ways ordinary people respond when war or political upheaval destroys familiar assumptions. With more than two million copies of her books sold and translations reaching readers in dozens of countries, Kelly has developed a distinctive place in contemporary historical fiction by recovering stories that history nearly left behind.