Women authors book series in reading order

by Anthea Fraser

by Tamsyn Muir

by Gill Hornby

by Ali Hazelwood

Susan Wittig Albert

67 books• 7 series

Susan Wittig Albert is an American mystery writer from Vermilion County, Illinois, who has also published as Robin Paige and Carolyn Keene. Before writing full time, Albert worked in academia and became the first female vice president of Southwest Texas State University. The catalogue lists 67 titles from 1992 to 2024. Thyme of Death (1992) comes first, then Witches' Bane (1993), Hangman's Root (1994) and Rosemary Remembered (1995), and Forget Me Never (2024) is the newest. Series include China Bayles, Darling Dahlias, Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, Crystal Cave and the Pecan Springs Enterprise Trilogy. Herbalists, Texas and the 1930s feature in the subject tags.

Margaret Atwood

89 books• 8 series

Margaret Atwood, born November 18, 1939, is a Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic and inventor. The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel from 1985, is the best-known Atwood work. Atwood's output includes 18 poetry books, 18 novels, 11 non-fiction books, nine short fiction collections, eight children's books and two graphic novels. The catalogue opens with The Circle Game (1964) and runs to Book of Lives (2025), with The Edible Woman (1969) and Surfacing (1972) along the way. Series include MaddAddam, Handmaid's Tale and Angel Catbird. Awards include two Booker Prizes, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Franz Kafka Prize and the Order of Canada.

Virginia Woolf

74 books• 6 series

Modernist writing in English owes a great deal to Virginia Woolf, who lived from 1882 to 1941 and did more than most to establish stream-of-consciousness narration as a working technique. Woolf was born in South Kensington, the seventh child of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson, and grew up among eight siblings, the painter Vanessa Bell among them. The catalogue collects her diaries, journals, letters and Collected Essays, together with biography and criticism of Woolf herself.

Rita Dove

15 books

Rita Dove, born 28 August 1952, is an American poet and essayist. In 1987 Dove became the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Dove served as poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995, the first African American in that post, and as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Dove has taught at the University of Virginia since 1989. The catalogue holds 15 books from The Yellow House on the Corner (1980) to Playlist for the Apocalypse (2021), including Thomas and Beulah (1986).

Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was an American poet whose subject was the natural world. The Pulitzer Prize came to Oliver in 1984, and the National Book Award followed in 1992. The catalogue holds 37 titles dated 1972 to 2026, from The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems to Goldfinches, taking in American Primitive (1983), Dream Work (1986), House of Light (1990) and A Poetry Handbook (1994). The volumes are short, around 80 pages at the median, and essay collections sit beside the poetry.

Philosophy and fiction sit side by side in Iris Murdoch's catalogue of 43 titles. The run opens with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), a study rather than a novel, and Under the Net follows. Good and evil, morality and the unconscious recur across the novels. Murdoch lived from 1919 to 1999, and collections such as Poems from an Attic continue to appear.

Alice Munro

28 books

Alice Munro (1931–2024) built a career on short fiction across five decades of publishing. The Canadian writer took the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 and the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her body of work. Her stories are set most often in Huron County in southwestern Ontario and move forward and backward in time within linked cycles, taking women, families and small-town manners as their material. 28 books are catalogued, from Dance of the Happy Shades (1968) onward, including Lives of Girls and Women (1971), The Beggar Maid (1977) and Open Secrets (1994).

Tamsyn Muir

12 books• 2 series

Tamsyn Muir, a New Zealand fantasy, science fiction and horror author born on 14 March 1985, is best known for The Locked Tomb, a science fantasy novel series. Gideon the Ninth (2019), the first Muir novel, won the 2020 Locus Award, and Harrow the Ninth followed in 2020. The catalogue lists 12 books from The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time (2011) to The Unwanted Guest (2023). Subject tags include necromancy, lesbians, dark fantasy and LGBTQ science fiction and fantasy, and Princess Floralinda and the Forty-Flight Tower is also listed.

Jean Margaret Laurence (née Wemyss; July 18, 1926 - January 5, 1987) was a Canadian novelist and short story writer, and ranks among the major figures of Canadian literature. Laurence founded the Writers' Trust of Canada, a non-profit organization set up to support the country's writing community. The catalogue holds 23 books, from A Tree for Poverty (1954) to Recognition and Revelation (2020), taking in This Side Jordan (1960), The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963), The Stone Angel (1964) and A Jest of God (1966). The Manawaka Sequence is the series recorded under Laurence's name, and subjects include Canadian fiction, women, travel, correspondence and biography.

Across 194 catalogued books, Danielle Steel writes contemporary romance and family drama: love stories, marriages, widowhood and the turns that reshape a life. The run starts with Going Home (1973) and continues through Celebration, with 24 Hours scheduled for 2027. Steel's catalogue also holds children's picture books, short stories and non-fiction beside the standalone novels that make up most of it.

Louise Erdrich

37 books• 3 series

Louise Erdrich (Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954) is an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's books with Native American characters and settings. Erdrich is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota. The Plague of Doves was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The catalogue lists 37 books from Imagination (1982) to Python's Kiss (2026), with the Love Medicine and Birchbark House series among them. Ojibwa life, Indian reservations and poetry feature in the subjects.

Marian Keyes

26 books• 5 series

Marian Keyes, born 10 September 1963, is an Irish novelist and radio presenter known for popular fiction. Watermelon, Lucy Sullivan Is Getting Married, Rachel's Holiday, Last Chance Saloon, Anybody Out There and This Charming Man take on alcoholism, depression, addiction, cancer, bereavement and domestic violence with humour. Keyes has sold more than 35 million copies in 33 languages. The catalogue lists 26 books, from Watermelon (1995) to My Favourite Mistake (2024), with the Walsh Family as the recurring series. Dublin, female friendship and single women are among the tagged subjects.

Edith Wharton

122 books• 6 series

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 to August 11, 1937), born Edith Newbold Jones, was an American novelist and designer. Wharton used first-hand knowledge of upper-class New York society to depict the lives and morals of the Gilded Age with realism. The Age of Innocence made Wharton the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921. The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome and a number of ghost stories are other well-known works, and Wharton entered the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1996. The catalogue lists 122 titles, from Souls Belated (1899) through The Touchstone (1900), The Valley of Decision (1902) and Sanctuary (1903). Old New York is the series on the author page.

Dame Catherine Cookson (born Catherine Ann McMullen, 20 June 1906 to 11 June 1998) was a British novelist. A hard childhood in South Shields, North East England, shaped the novels and supplied their setting. By 2003 Cookson's books had sold an estimated 100 million copies, and 104 titles appeared under the Cookson name and two pen names. The catalogue records 112 books, from Kate Hannigan (1950) to The Rag Maid (2017). Series include Mary Ann Shaughnessy, the Bailey Chronicles, the Mallen Trilogy and the Hamilton Trilogy. Working-class life, family sagas and historical romance appear among the subject tags.

Hannah Dennison writes mysteries set in England, across three series: Vicky Hill, Honeychurch Hall Mysteries and Island Sisters Mysteries. Vicky Hill is the recurring character of the earliest books, from A Vicky Hill Exclusive! (2008). Murder investigations, manor houses, women journalists and mothers and daughters recur as subjects. Dennison's catalogue holds 19 books and reaches Deadly Derailment at Honeychurch Hall (2026).

Anthea Fraser, born in 1930, is a British writer of mystery novels. Fraser's catalogue runs to 64 books published between 1971 and 2026, organised around three detective series: David Webb, Rona Parish and the Chiltern Hills Mysteries. England, village life and police investigation are the recurring settings. An early strand of the work is supernatural rather than criminal, starting with Laura Possessed (1974). Fraser issued some titles as Vanessa Graham, among them In The Balance (1973) and Time on Trial (1979), and the newest book is A Bookish Ending (2026).

Kasey Michaels is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author credited with more than 110 books, and the catalogue lists 123 from The Belligerent Miss Boynton (1982) to Her Royal Pain-In-The-Highness (2023). Early titles include The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (1982), The Rambunctious Lady Royston (1983), The Savage Miss Saxon (1985) and Compliments of the Groom (1987). Michaels has received a RITA, four Publishers Weekly starred reviews and a Romantic Times Career Achievement award for Regency historical romance, and is on the Romance Writers of America Honor Roll. Series include Maggie Kelly, Romney Marsh, Redgraves, Daughtry Family, Crown Family and Sunshine Girls.

A.S. Byatt

29 books• 1 series

A.S. Byatt was the professional name of Dame Antonia Susan Duffy (1936-2023), an English novelist, critic, poet and short-story writer whose books have been translated into more than thirty languages. Degrees of Freedom (1965) opens a catalogue of 29 titles. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985) belong to the Frederica Quartet, built around Frederica Potter, and Possession (1990) sits at the centre of the fiction. Criticism runs alongside the novels in Unruly Times (1973) and Passions of the Mind (1990), and Medusa's Ankles (2021) is the last dated entry.

Carol Ann Shields, born Warner on June 2, 1935 and died July 16, 2003, was a Canadian novelist and short story writer. The Stone Diaries, published in 1993, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the United States and the Governor General's Award in Canada. The catalogue holds 29 books dated between 1972 and 2021, among them Small Ceremonies (1976), The Box Garden (1977), Various Miracles (1985) and Swann (1987), and it closes with The Collected Poetry of Carol Shields (2021). Recorded subjects include Canadian women authors, families, mothers and daughters, and married people.

Myriam J. A. Chancy

9 books

Myriam J. A. Chancy, born in 1970, is a Haitian-Canadian-American writer and a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Since 2008 Chancy has held the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair of Humanities at Scripps College in the Claremont Consortium, and the work concentrates on Haitian culture, gender, class, sexuality and Caribbean women's studies. Prizes to the novels include the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award. Nine books are catalogued, from Framing Silence (1997) to Village Weavers (2024), taking in Searching for Safe Spaces (1997), Spirit of Haiti (2004), The Loneliness of Angels (2010), Autochthonomies (2020) and What Storm, What Thunder (2021).

Lisa Kleypas, born November 5, 1964, is an American author of historical and contemporary romance novels. Before writing professionally, Kleypas was Miss Massachusetts 1985 and competed in the Miss America 1986 pageant in Atlantic City. The catalogue lists 50 Kleypas books from Where Passion Leads (1987) to Queen of Lombard Street (2026). Series include the Wallflowers, Hathaways, Ravenels, Travis, Friday Harbor and Bow Street Runners, and subjects on file include nobility, aristocracy and London.

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

Maya Angelou

51 books• 3 series

Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928 – May 28, 2014), born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was an American memoirist, poet, essayist and civil rights activist. Angelou published seven autobiographies, three books of essays and several books of poetry. The first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), covers Angelou's life up to age 17. Other catalogued titles include Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). The catalogue counts 51 books, including And Still I Rise (1978), and ends with Strategies of Abundance (2014). Angelou received more than 50 honorary degrees.

Ally Carter

29 books• 8 series

Spies, thieves and boarding schools furnish Ally Carter's fiction for young readers. The Gallagher Girls series, set at a school that trains teenage spies, runs from 2006 through Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, Don't Judge a Girl by Her Cover and Only the Good Spy Young. Heist Society turns to con artists, Embassy Row to diplomatic intrigue, and Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor to a mystery for younger readers. Thirty titles make up the catalogue, which began with the adult novel Cheating at Solitaire (2005).