Below is the complete list of Olivia Hawker 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 Point In Time Books
About Olivia Hawker
Olivia Hawker is the pen name of American historical novelist Libbie Grant, whose fiction is known for emotionally layered characters, vivid landscapes, and stories in which family, faith, survival, and personal freedom collide with larger historical forces. A Washington Post bestselling author, Hawker has written about Nazi Germany, the nineteenth-century American frontier, Mormon settlement in Utah, 1970s Idaho, and Depression-era America. Her work often begins with people whose lives are constrained by family expectations, religious communities, poverty, war, or geography and follows the difficult choices they make when those structures begin to break apart.
Grant was born in Rexburg, Idaho, and grew up in the Seattle area. She entered publishing through self-publishing during the early expansion of the Kindle market, initially writing historical fiction as Libbie Hawker. In 2017, Lake Union Publishing asked her to develop a more literary style of historical novel under a new name, creating the Olivia Hawker identity. Her earlier Libbie Hawker books remain available, while she has also published under her real name, Libbie Grant.
The first Olivia Hawker novel, The Ragged Edge of Night, appeared in 2018. Set in Germany during World War II, it was inspired by Anton Starzmann, the grandfather of Hawker’s husband, a former Franciscan friar who became involved in resistance to the Nazi regime. The novel established several qualities that recur throughout her later work: ordinary people facing morally overwhelming circumstances, historical events viewed through domestic life, and characters whose courage develops gradually rather than through conventional heroism.
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow shifted to the Wyoming frontier, where two neighboring families must depend upon one another after betrayal and violence leave them dangerously isolated. Hawker’s interest in genealogy helped shape the novel, as it has other parts of her historical fiction. The book became one of her best-known works and was a finalist for both the Washington State Book Award and the WILLA Literary Award for Historical Fiction.
Her subsequent novels demonstrate a reluctance to remain in one historical period. The Rise of Light moves to Rexburg in 1975 and examines a controlling family environment, artistic ambition, and the struggle to break inherited patterns. The Fire and the Ore reaches back to nineteenth-century Utah and draws partly on Hawker’s family history to tell the story of three women connected through plural marriage during the turbulent period surrounding the Utah War.
October in the Earth takes place during the Great Depression and follows a woman who leaves an unhappy marriage and joins the transient world of people riding freight trains across America. The novel continues Hawker’s recurring interest in people who step outside socially prescribed lives and must discover whether independence can survive the practical hardships that follow.
Hawker has also contributed shorter historical fiction, including “Landing” in the multi-author A Point in Time collection, which places a troubled marriage against the Apollo 11 era.
Across her bibliography, Hawker is less interested in famous historical figures than in the private lives unfolding around major events. Her novels repeatedly examine how people endure restrictive families, religious certainty, economic hardship, isolation, and political upheaval while searching for more honest ways to live. Now based in British Columbia, she continues to write historical fiction in which landscape and history exert real pressure on characters, but intimate relationships remain the place where the consequences are most deeply felt.