Genevieve Graham
Genevieve Graham has published 12 books across 2 series. The recommended reading order starts with Sound of the Heart (2012).
Genevieve Graham is a Canadian author who writes historical fiction that uncovers forgotten moments in her nation's past. She came to writing late, never planning to become an author and not attempting her first story until after she turned forty. That late start has since led to ten novels, including The Forgotten Home Child, Letters Across the Sea, Bluebird, and The Secret Keeper, with The Chambermaid's Key arriving in April 2026.
Graham focuses on overlooked experiences in Canadian history, particularly those of families, women, and communities navigating hardship and change. She blends careful research with emotional storytelling, hoping each book teaches something about history while inspiring readers to learn more. Her early novels set in Scotland are now out of print and no longer represent her current work. She lives outside Edmonton, Alberta.
Shelf & Shadows
Order of Standalone Novels
- Tagshistorical-fictionDescriptionIn the summer of 1916, Private Daniel Baker marches into battle with Nova Scotia's 25th Battalion and meets the one person who can break through the steel he has built against the war. Tides of Honour is a historical novel about a soldier and an artist whose love begins in France and must survive the wreckage that follows them home. Audrey Poulin lives with her grandmother in the quiet French countryside, finding her only joy in painting. When she encounters Danny by chance, the young soldier captures her heart and inspires her work. The two believe that together they can face whatever the war brings. Then Danny is gravely wounded at the Battle of the Somme, and the future they imagined is thrown into uncertainty. In Halifax, the couple struggles to build a new life in a city grieving its lost men. As the grey winter of 1917 sets in, Danny's shellshock deepens and Audrey's isolation grows, pulling them apart just as a new catastrophe closes in. The question at the heart of the novel is whether love and loyalty are enough to hold two people together when war has changed them both — and whether second chances are possible when the world itself is breaking.Publication dateApril 21, 2015Amazon rating4.5/5Print length448LanguageEnglishPublisherS&S Canada Adult
- Tags---DescriptionAmélie Belliveau lives with her family on a farm in Grande Pré, Nova Scotia, in the summer of 1755, surrounded by the Acadian community and their Mi'kmaq neighbors. The Acadians believe they can stay neutral as war rises between the British and the French. When they refuse to pledge allegiance to the British crown, the army invades, seizes their land, and forces the entire population onto ships bound for unknown ports. Amélie and her family are torn from their home and exiled. Promises to Keep is a historical novel about survival and forbidden loyalty in the midst of the Acadian expulsion. Corporal Connor MacDonnell, a British soldier who has his own painful history with the English, is ordered to help carry out the deportation. He meets Amélie during the chaos, and his initial sympathy turns into something deeper. As more ships arrive to carry the Acadians away, Connor must decide how far he will go to protect Amélie and her family — even if helping them means committing treason. The choice he makes will shape both their futures, and the clock is running out.Publication dateApril 4, 2017Amazon rating4.3/5Print length336LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
- Tags---DescriptionCome from Away is a historical novel set in a Nova Scotian fishing village during the Second World War. Grace Baker runs the general store in East Jeddore while her three brothers fight overseas. The war was supposed to end quickly, but by 1942 it has dragged on for three years and German U-Boats are rumored to prowl the waters just beyond her window. Grace keeps her head down and her hands busy, until a stranger walks into the store one autumn day. Rudi says he is a trapper passing through. He is soft-spoken and kind, and over the weeks that follow, Grace finds herself drawn to him in ways she cannot ignore. Then she learns the truth: Rudi is not who he claims to be, and he is not someone she should trust. At the same moment, a revelation about her own family upends everything Grace thought she knew about loyalty and belonging. She and Rudi, it turns out, are not so different after all. If Grace wants a future with him, she will have to decide where she stands — and what she is willing to risk.Publication dateApril 24, 2018Amazon rating4.2/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherS&S Canada Adult
- TagsromanceDescriptionLiza Peterson travels north to Dawson City in 1897, bringing her family's general store to the only established town in the Yukon as thousands swarm toward Klondike gold. Constable Ben Turner, a recent recruit of the North-West Mounted Police, sees the lawless boom town — overrun with guns, liquor, prostitutes, and thieves — as his chance to escape a dark past and become the man of integrity he has always wanted to be. But the trek over icy mountain passes and whitewater rapids is more treacherous than either imagined, and as Liza's family nears the mountain's peak, catastrophe strikes with fatal consequences. Not even the NWMP can help.Publication dateApril 2, 2019Amazon rating4.3/5Print length368LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
- TagschildrenDescriptionFifteen-year-old Winny has never known a real home. After running away from an abusive stepfather, she falls in with Mary, Jack, and their ragtag group of friends roaming the streets of Liverpool. When the children are caught stealing food, Winny and Mary are left in Dr. Barnardo's Barkingside Home for Girls, a local home for orphans and forgotten children found in the city's slums. There, Winny learns she will soon join other boys and girls in a faraway place called Canada, where families and better lives await them. The Forgotten Home Child, Genevieve Graham's historical novel based on the true story of the British Home Children, follows Winny across the Atlantic to a family that has no use for another daughter. They have paid for an indentured servant to work on their farm. Separated from her friends and faced with this harsh new reality, Winny clings to the belief that she will someday find them again. Decades later, at ninety-seven years old, Winnifred Ellis has kept the truth about her shameful past buried for a lifetime. But when her great-grandson Jamie asks about his family tree, she must decide whether to break a promise she made so long ago — and whether the home she made for herself can withstand the secrets she has carried alone.Publication dateMarch 3, 2020Amazon rating4.6/5Print length384LanguageEnglishPublisherS&S Canada Adult
- Tags---DescriptionLetters Across the Sea is a historical novel set in Toronto and Hong Kong during the years leading up to and through World War II. In 1933, eighteen-year-old Molly Ryan works any job she can find to help her family survive the Depression. Her one escape is playing baseball with her best friend Hannah Dreyfus and stealing glances at Hannah's older brother Max. But as Hitler's ideas spread across the Atlantic, swastika clubs and exclusion signs appear throughout the city, and tensions between Toronto's Irish Protestant and Jewish communities reach a breaking point. When a riot erupts at a baseball game one August day, Molly and Max are thrown together in a way that sparks a secret neither can share with their families. Six years later, Molly has become a reporter and the Depression has lifted, but a new war looms. Max enlists to fight overseas, and the letters between them become the only thread holding their connection together. As the war grinds on and devastating truths surface, both families face painful betrayals. The question Molly must answer is whether love can survive the divides carved by hatred, secrecy, and years of silence — and whether it is too late to make things right.Publication dateApril 27, 2021Amazon rating4.6/5Print length484LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
- Tags---DescriptionCorporal Jeremiah Bailey plants mines in tunnels beneath enemy trenches for the 1st Canadian Tunnelling Company until an explosion leaves him badly wounded in a Belgium field hospital. There he meets Adele Savard, a Canadian nursing sister nicknamed a Bluebird for her blue gown and white cap. She is from a place near his hometown of Windsor, along the Detroit River, and as Jerry recovers, the two form a connection that reminds him what home means. When he is sent back to the front, he can only hope he will see his bluebird again. By war's end, both Jerry and Adele have returned to Windsor, scarred by what they endured overseas. When they cross paths one day, they have a chance to start over. But the city is in the grip of Prohibition, which brings opportunities as well as dangerous conflicts that threaten to destroy everything they fought for. Bluebird, first published in 2022, moves between their story and the present day, where museum curator Cassie Simmons unearths a cache of whisky labeled Bailey Brothers' Best during a local renovation and begins searching for answers about the legendary family of bootleggers — a search that may finally connect her to the secrets that bind Jerry and Adele's past to her own.Publication dateApril 5, 2022Amazon rating4.4/5Print length352LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
- Tags---DescriptionTwin sisters Dot and Dash Wilson are inseparable but opposite. Dot loves puzzles, books, and Morse code; Dash fixes engines and dreams of flying. When their best friend Gus enlists and war breaks out, both sisters join the WRENS to serve. The Secret Keeper is a World War II novel about the secrets that pull them apart. Dot's gift for patterns takes her from a covert codebreaking station to Camp X, a top-secret spy school. Dash becomes a mechanic, then seizes the chance to train as a pilot with the Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying aircraft across the battlefields of Europe. But personal tragedy strikes the family, and Dot's oath of secrecy creates a rift between the sisters that neither can cross. As the Allies prepare for D-Day, Dot is drawn deeper into Operation Overlord. Then someone close to her goes missing in Nazi-occupied territory. With the invasion imminent and every resource focused on the mission, Dot must use every skill she has learned to save the person she loves. The question is whether she can do it without breaking the vow that has already cost her so much.Publication dateApril 2, 2024Amazon rating4.4/5Print length448LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
- Tags---DescriptionOn Isabella Street is a novel set in Toronto and Vietnam during the 1960s, following two women whose lives intersect in an apartment building at a time when protest and social upheaval are remaking the world around them. Marion Hart, a psychiatrist at a major mental institution, fights the shift toward deinstitutionalization because she believes closing these facilities will push vulnerable people onto the streets. When Daniel Neumann, a wounded veteran, arrives as a patient, Marion begins to see beyond the narrow borders of her own carefully ordered life. Sassy Rankin, a folk singer and daughter of a real estate developer, joins the protests against the Vietnam War even as her brother enlists in the Marines. Her father's work gentrifying the city forces her to reckon with the cost of her privilege and the displacement of the people she marches beside. The two women form an unlikely friendship in the building they share. When one of them faces a catastrophic event, the other must decide how far she will go to set things right. The novel moves between Toronto and the war in Vietnam, tracing the distance between the decade's hope and its ruin, and the question of what friendship demands when the world breaks open.Publication dateApril 22, 2025Amazon rating4.3/5Print length432LanguageEnglishPublisherSimon & Schuster
Order of The MacDonnells Books
- Tagshistorical-fictionDescriptionDougal MacDonnell can hear the thoughts of other men and see the future in his dreams. Sound of the Heart is a historical novel set in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden in 1746, when Dougal loses his family to the English and swears to hate them forever. He is a Highland warrior with a strange gift and nowhere left to call home. Then Glenna, the woman he loves, is captured as a Scottish outlaw and shipped to the colonies. To follow her, Dougal must do the unthinkable: join an English army made of vanquished Scots and fight on the side of the men who destroyed everything he had. The crossing takes him across the ocean to a new world, where he will search for Glenna among strangers and enemies. The question is whether his gifts can guide him to her — or whether serving the English will cost him the last person he has left to lose.Publication dateMay 1, 2012Amazon rating4.2/5Print length327LanguageEnglishPublisherBerkley Trade
- TagsromanceDescriptionUnder the Same Sky is a historical romance set in 1746, when a woman in South Carolina and a Scottish Highlander have shared dreams their entire lives but never met. Maggie Johnson calls him Wolf and has watched him grow from boy to warrior through visions granted by her Sight. Andrew MacDonnell knows her as the beautiful woman who dwells in his dreams. They have lived parallel lives across an ocean, connected by something neither can explain. When tragedy destroys Maggie's world, Wolf becomes her only hope. When war ravages Andrew's Highland home, he leaves Scotland on a perilous crossing to the New World to find the woman from his dreams. Their survival depends on finding each other in a treacherous wilderness, guided only by the visions that have bound them since childhood and by a love they have never been able to touch. The question is whether dreams alone can lead two people across an ocean and through a land that offers no mercy.Publication dateJanuary 3, 2012Amazon rating4.2/5Print length336LanguageEnglishPublisherBerkley
- TagshorrorDescriptionThe Cherokee call Adelaide Shadow Girl. A white woman adopted by the tribe, she is haunted by visions she cannot control — dreams of her murdered family, of the men she fears, and of events that have not yet come to pass. When her prophetic gift leads to a terrible mistake, she renounces it and buries the visions as deep as they will go. Then Jesse Black is captured. The Cherokee spare his life because they believe his warrior spirit belongs to their fallen brother, but Jesse hates all Indians and everything they stand for. Adelaide becomes the bridge between him and the tribe, showing him their way of life while he brings light into the darkness she has carried for years. Somewhere to Dream, part of the Order of The MacDonnells Books series, is a historical romance about two strangers bound by circumstance. When Adelaide's visions return, Jesse must help her face what she has spent years running from — or they will both pay the price.Publication dateNovember 5, 2013Amazon rating4.4/5Print length336LanguageEnglishPublisherBerkley
Frequently Asked Questions about Genevieve Graham
Genevieve Graham writes historical fiction. To start with her work, you might begin with a standalone novel like Tides of Honour, published in 2015. Alternatively, if you prefer a series, The MacDonnells series begins with Sound of the Heart, also published in 2012. Both are good entry points to her storytelling, offering a glimpse into the settings and themes she explores. Readers often appreciate diving into a standalone first to get a feel for her style before committing to a series.
A good place to start with Genevieve Graham is with her standalone novel Tides of Honour, published in 2015. This book offers a solid introduction to her writing style and the historical settings she favors. Another option is to begin with the first book in The MacDonnells series, Sound of the Heart, which was also released in 2012. Both choices provide an entry into her historical fiction without requiring prior knowledge of other books.
The MacDonnells series should be read in order to fully appreciate the character development and narrative progression. The books within this series are Sound of the Heart (2012), Under the Same Sky (2012), and Somewhere to Dream (2013). While the standalone novels can be read in any order, engaging with The MacDonnells series sequentially will provide the most cohesive reading experience and allow readers to follow the story as it unfolds.
Genevieve Graham writes both standalone novels and series. Her standalone novels include titles such as Tides of Honour (2015), Promises to Keep (2017), Come from Away (2018), At the Mountain's Edge (2019), and The Forgotten Home Child (2020), among others. She also has a series titled The MacDonnells, which consists of three books: Sound of the Heart (2012), Under the Same Sky (2012), and Somewhere to Dream (2013). This combination allows readers to choose between self-contained stories or a connected narrative.
Genevieve Graham has written at least nine books. This includes her collection of standalone novels, such as Tides of Honour (2015), Promises to Keep (2017), Come from Away (2018), At the Mountain's Edge (2019), and The Forgotten Home Child (2020), plus four more not individually listed. She also authored The MacDonnells series, which comprises three books: Sound of the Heart (2012), Under the Same Sky (2012), and Somewhere to Dream (2013). The total number reflects both her individual works and her series contributions.
The first book Genevieve Graham wrote was Sound of the Heart, published in 2012. This novel is also the first book in The MacDonnells series. It was released in the same year as her second book, Under the Same Sky, which is also part of The MacDonnells series. This marks the beginning of her published work, setting the stage for her later standalone novels and further contributions to historical fiction.
Genevieve Graham's most recent book listed is The Forgotten Home Child, published in 2020. This is one of her standalone novels. The provided information does not include details on any books published after 2020. Therefore, based on the available data, The Forgotten Home Child stands as her most recent work. Readers interested in her latest publications may wish to check for newer releases.
Genevieve Graham writes historical fiction. Her novels often draw on Canadian history, exploring themes of family, resilience, and identity against significant historical backdrops. She is known for her detailed research and ability to bring the past to life for her readers. Her work spans both individual standalone novels and connected series, all rooted in the genre of historical fiction.
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We verified the reading order for Genevieve Graham's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: July 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Genevieve Graham Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/genevieve-graham