Below is the complete list of Susan Wiggs books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Bella Vista Chronicles Books
Publication Order of Calhoun Chronicles Books
Publication Order of Discovery Books
Publication Order of Family Tree Books
Publication Order of Great Chicago Fire Trilogy Books
Publication Order of Lakeshore Chronicles Books
Publication Order of Tudor Rose Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Heart of the West Books
About Susan Wiggs
Susan Wiggs is an American novelist whose long career has moved from historical romance into contemporary romance and broader relationship-centered fiction, with family, home, memory, and second chances recurring throughout her work. A #1 New York Times bestselling author, she has written both extensive interconnected series and stand-alone novels, building a bibliography that spans several decades while gradually broadening beyond the traditional boundaries of genre romance. Her books have also reached an international audience through translations in more than twenty languages.
Wiggs graduated from Harvard University and worked as a teacher before becoming a full-time novelist. Although she had been inventing stories since childhood, her professional publishing career began in 1987 with Texas Wildflower, a Western historical romance. Her early work concentrated heavily on historical settings, and she subsequently developed several connected historical-romance sequences, including the Tudor Rose trilogy, the Calhoun Chronicles, and the Chicago Fire Trilogy. These books established her ability to combine romantic relationships with strong historical environments rather than treating period settings merely as decoration.
Among her historical series, the Calhoun Chronicles became one of her best-known early bodies of work. Beginning with The Charm School, the sequence follows interconnected members of the Calhoun family and those around them, moving through nineteenth-century America while giving each central couple a distinct story. The Chicago Fire Trilogy uses the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 as the defining event linking another set of romances. Wiggs received major recognition during this period of her career, including RITA Awards for Lord of the Night and The Mistress. She later won another RITA for Lakeside Cottage.
Her fiction gradually shifted toward contemporary stories in which romance remained important but shared space with marriage, parenting, grief, career changes, friendship, and complicated family relationships. Books such as The You I Never Knew, Home Before Dark, and The Ocean Between Us helped establish this broader direction. Wiggs became particularly interested in characters reaching turning points—people confronting old decisions, returning to places they thought they had left behind, or discovering that the life they constructed no longer suits them.
The Lakeshore Chronicles became the most substantial expression of that approach. Set around Willow Lake and the town of Avalon in New York’s Catskills, the series follows an expanding community rather than a single protagonist. Summer at Willow Lake introduces the setting, while later novels revisit familiar families and allow secondary characters to take central roles. Romance anchors individual books, but the larger appeal comes from accumulated relationships, generational connections, parent-child tensions, friendships, and the continuing sense of community around the lake.
Wiggs has also written the interconnected Bella Vista novels, beginning with The Apple Orchard and The Beekeeper’s Ball. These stories demonstrate another recurring feature of her later fiction: the past frequently enters the present through family history, inherited property, hidden relationships, or discoveries that force characters to reconsider their identities. The Lost and Found Bookshop and Sugar and Salt continue within the broader Perdita Street setting while expanding its network of characters and relationships.
Her more recent stand-alone fiction has continued moving toward emotionally layered family and women’s fiction, including The Oysterville Sewing Circle, Welcome to Beach Town, and Wayward Girls. Across both her earlier romances and later novels, Wiggs remains particularly associated with ordinary people facing disruptive circumstances and rebuilding their lives through relationships, family, community, and difficult acts of reinvention. That evolution makes her bibliography best understood not as one uniform body of romance novels, but as a career that began in historical romance and steadily expanded into interconnected contemporary sagas and character-driven fiction with romance at its emotional core.