Below is the complete list of Rita Mae Brown’s Runnymede books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Runnymede Books
About Runnymede
Rita Mae Brown’s Runnymede series is a multigenerational saga centered on the fictional town of Runnymede, positioned along the Maryland-Pennsylvania border. Beginning with Six of One, the books follow interconnected families, friends, rivals, and lovers across much of the twentieth century, using the town’s history to explore women’s lives, sexuality, family loyalty, social class, race, politics, and changing American attitudes. Rather than functioning as a conventional series with one protagonist and a continuous plot, Runnymede is an ensemble chronicle in which characters age, generations overlap, and private lives unfold alongside major historical changes.
Six of One, published in 1978, establishes Runnymede and many of the relationships that sustain the sequence. At its center are two formidable sisters, Julia “Juts” Hunsenmeir and Louise “Wheezie” Hunsenmeir, whose lifelong mixture of affection, competition, argument, and loyalty gives the novel much of its energy.
The story moves between periods, reconstructing decades of family and community history rather than proceeding in a simple chronological line. Through Juts, Wheezie, their relatives, and the people surrounding them, Brown builds a portrait of women whose lives do not always conform to the respectable versions of history preserved publicly.
The series continues with Bingo, which returns to the Hunsenmeirs and their extended community. Brown uses Runnymede’s residents to satirize local institutions and social pretensions while preserving the emotional seriousness beneath the comedy. Family members may quarrel relentlessly, but their arguments exist within relationships that have survived for decades.
Loose Lips moves backward historically, concentrating on Runnymede during the years surrounding World War II. The novel gives greater attention to an earlier stage in the lives of familiar characters and shows how wartime disruption changes employment, romance, sexuality, and expectations for women. Brown’s approach to history remains deliberately domestic: national events matter because of what they do to households, friendships, businesses, and individual opportunities.
The Sand Castle returns to the younger years of Juts and Wheezie, extending the family chronicle into childhood and the formative experiences that help explain the women encountered elsewhere in the series. This movement backward demonstrates why publication order and chronological order are not the same. Brown gradually fills gaps in the family history rather than narrating it from earliest event to latest.
Later Runnymede novels continue expanding the town across different eras, including Cakewalk, which takes the community into the years of the Great Depression. Once again, historical events are filtered through everyday survival, relationships, ambitions, and the particular personalities of Runnymede’s residents.
The series has strong thematic connections with Brown’s wider fiction. Like Rubyfruit Jungle, the Runnymede novels include women who resist prescribed roles and sexual conventions. Unlike the more individually focused story of Molly Bolt, however, Runnymede distributes that rebellious energy across families and generations. Lesbian and bisexual relationships exist within a much broader social landscape of marriages, friendships, rivalries, motherhood, work, and community expectations.
Place is as important as genealogy. Runnymede’s unusual position on a state border gives Brown a setting with its own identity and traditions, while recurring homes, businesses, streets, and local institutions accumulate history as the books progress. Characters who dominate one novel may become part of the background in another, reinforcing the sense that the town rather than any single individual is the series’ true protagonist.
Publication order is generally the best way to approach Runnymede. Although later books sometimes take place earlier historically, they were written with the established characters and relationships already in mind. Reading them as published allows Brown’s gradual revelations about the Hunsenmeirs and their community to work as intended.
Across the series, Brown treats history as something experienced around kitchen tables and through family stories rather than merely recorded in textbooks. Runnymede changes with America, but its residents remain tied together by memory, affection, resentment, and stories repeated across generations—often with considerable disagreement about what actually happened.