Author Guide · Women’s Fiction
Books Written by
Susan Wiggs writes her first drafts by hand, with a fountain pen and peacock-blue ink, and she has filled a lot of pages that way: more than fifty novels since Texas Wildflower in 1987, translated into more than twenty languages. A Harvard graduate and former maths teacher, she began with historical romance, won Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award, and in 2006 moved to the contemporary family novels she is now best known for, starting with the Lakeshore Chronicles, set around a lake in the Catskills. Her recent books go further back in time and into darker material, from the French Resistance to a Magdalene laundry in 1968 Buffalo. This guide covers her 10 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 key books · 1999–2025 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Susan Wiggs has published more than fifty novels. Her best-known are Summer at Willow Lake (2006), which opens the eleven-book Lakeshore Chronicles, Family Tree (2016), The Oysterville Sewing Circle (2019) and The Lost and Found Bookshop (2020). Start with Summer at Willow Lake; below is how her historical romances, her series and her stand-alone novels fit together.
Where to Start with Susan Wiggs
If you want her best-known series
→ Summer at Willow Lake (2006) — the first of the Lakeshore Chronicles.
If you want a family story with real history behind it
→ Map of the Heart (2017) — a beach town and the French Resistance.
If you want a bookshop novel
→ The Lost and Found Bookshop (2020).
If you want her darkest, most recent book
→ Wayward Girls (2025) — based on a true story from 1968 Buffalo.
10 Susan Wiggs Books, in Order
The Charm School
The first of the Calhoun Chronicles, five historical romances she published between 1999 and 2003 around one American family. Isadora Peabody, a plain and bookish Boston heiress, goes to sea with the ship’s captain Ash Calhoun.
The Mistress
The middle book of a trilogy that runs from The Hostage (2000) to The Firebrand (2001), set in Chicago in the years around the Great Fire of 1871. It won the 2001 RITA Award for Best Short Historical from Romance Writers of America.
Summer at Willow Lake
Olivia “Lolly” Bellamy, a home stager from New York City, goes back to Camp Kioga, her family’s old summer camp on Willow Lake in the Catskills, to restore it in time for her grandparents to renew their vows there on their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The contractor she hires is Connor Davis, the boy she knew there as a teenager. It opened the Lakeshore Chronicles, set in the town of Avalon, New York, which ran to eleven novels by 2015.
The Apple Orchard
Tess Delaney, a driven young woman, learns that she has a grandfather she never knew, Magnus Johansen, who owns an old apple orchard in Sonoma, California, and a half-sister, Isabel. The two women have to decide what to do with the orchard and with each other. The sequel is The Beekeeper’s Ball (2014).
Family Tree
Annie Harlow produces a popular cooking show in Los Angeles and is expecting her first child when an accident leaves her in a coma for a year. She wakes to find she has lost the pregnancy, her marriage and her job, and goes home to her family’s maple farm in Switchback, Vermont, where a cookbook her grandmother wrote leads to an old family secret.
Map of the Heart
Camille Adams, a widow raising her teenage daughter Julia in the coastal town of Bethany Bay, is hired by the historian Malcolm “Finn” Finnemore to help with a war history project. When her father takes the family back to his hometown in France, they uncover seventy-year-old secrets about his parents and the French Resistance in the Second World War.
The Oysterville Sewing Circle
Caroline Shelby, a fashion designer whose New York career has collapsed, comes home to Oysterville, a hamlet on the Pacific coast of Washington, as guardian of her dead friend’s two young children. At the sewing shop of her old mentor she meets women hiding domestic abuse, and starts a support group for them. Her first love, the wounded Navy SEAL Will Jensen, is now married to her best friend.
The Lost and Found Bookshop
After her mother Blythe is killed in a plane crash, Natalie Harper leaves her job at a wine company to run the family bookshop in San Francisco’s historic Sunrose Building and to look after her grandfather Andrew, who has early dementia. The building is falling apart, and the contractor who comes to fix it, Peach Gallagher, is a divorced former Marine with a young daughter.
Sugar and Salt
Margot Salton, a barbecue cook from Texas, opens a restaurant in a shared commercial kitchen on Perdita Street in San Francisco, far from a past that soon catches up with her. Across the street is the Lost and Found Bookshop, supplied by the neighbouring bakery whose baker becomes the other half of the story.
Wayward Girls
Buffalo, New York, 1968: six teenage girls are held at a Catholic institution for being, in the publisher’s words, “gay, pregnant or unruly”. The setting is based on the former Good Shepherd home on Best Street, a Magdalene laundry where young women were sent to be “reformed” and made to work. The Vietnam War, women’s rights protests and the 1968 Buffalo race riot run through the background. Published by William Morrow in July 2025, it returns to the area where Wiggs grew up.
In What Order to Read Susan Wiggs
Her books fall into three groups: the historical romances of the 1980s and 1990s, the contemporary series (the Lakeshore Chronicles and the Bella Vista Chronicles), and the stand-alone novels she has written for William Morrow since 2016. The series are best read in order, because couples and families from earlier books return; everything else can be read on its own.
The Lost and Found Bookshop and Sugar and Salt share a street in San Francisco, so read the bookshop novel first. Leave Wayward Girls until you know her lighter work; it is the hardest of her books.
A reading path
1. Summer at Willow Lake (2006)
2. The Apple Orchard (2013)
3. Family Tree (2016)
4. Map of the Heart (2017)
5. Wayward Girls (2025)
Everything Else Susan Wiggs Published
Beyond the 10 key books: 30 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
The rest of the Lakeshore Chronicles
10
10 books · 2007–2015
- 2007The Winter Lodgebook 2
- 2007Docksidebook 3
- 2008Snowfall at Willow Lakebook 4
- 2009Firesidebook 5
- 2009Lakeshore Christmasbook 6
- 2010The Summer Hideawaybook 7
- 2011Marrying Daisy Bellamybook 8
- 2012Return to Willow Lakebook 9
- 2013Candlelight Christmasbook 10
- 2015Starlight on Willow Lakebook 11
Other series
8
8 books · 1999–2014
- 1999The Horsemaster’s DaughterCalhoun Chronicles
- 2000The Hostagefirst of the trilogy with The Mistress
- 2001The Firebrandlast of the same trilogy
- 2001Halfway to HeavenCalhoun Chronicles
- 2003Enchanted AfternoonCalhoun Chronicles
- 2003A Summer AffairCalhoun Chronicles
- 2004The Ocean Between Usfirst of a pair, continued in The Story of Us (2010)
- 2014The Beekeeper’s BallBella Vista Chronicles, book 2
Stand-alone novels
12
12 books · 1987–2023
- 1987Texas Wildflowerher first published novel
- 1993Lord of the Nighthistorical romance
- 1998The Lightkeeperhistorical romance
- 2001The You I Never Knewcontemporary novel
- 2002Passing Through Paradisecontemporary novel
- 2003Home Before Darkcontemporary novel
- 2004Summer by the Seacontemporary novel
- 2005Lakeside Cottagewon the RITA Award in 2006
- 2005Table for Fivecontemporary novel
- 2008Just Breathecontemporary novel
- 2018Between You and Mestand-alone novel for William Morrow
- 2023The Twelve Dogs of Christmasholiday novel
The years · 1958–2025
Quick facts about Susan Wiggs
- Known for
- Susan Wiggs is known for warm, family-centred novels about women who go home to a small place and rebuild their lives, above all the Lakeshore Chronicles.
- 1958
- Born; grows up in western New York and abroad
- 1987
- First novel, Texas Wildflower
- 2001
- RITA Award for The Mistress
- 2025
- Wayward Girls
- Born
- 17 May 1958; grew up in a small town near Buffalo, New York, and overseas
- Education
- Harvard University
- Before writing
- Taught maths; writing full-time since 1992
- Lives
- Bainbridge Island, in Puget Sound, Washington
- Awards
- RITA Awards for The Mistress (2001) and Lakeside Cottage (2006)
- Reach
- More than fifty novels, translated into more than twenty languages
The red mark is 2006: Summer at Willow Lake, the first of the Lakeshore Chronicles.
How Susan Wiggs Writes: Going Home
Most of her contemporary novels begin with the same move: a woman whose life in the city has fallen apart goes back to a small place she once left. Olivia Bellamy returns to a Catskills summer camp, Annie Harlow to a Vermont maple farm, Caroline Shelby to an oyster town in Washington, Natalie Harper to her mother’s bookshop. The place is never just scenery; it comes with a family business that is failing, and saving it is the plot.
Under the comfort there is usually something hard. The Oysterville Sewing Circle is about domestic violence, Map of the Heart about the French Resistance, The Lost and Found Bookshop about grief and dementia, and Wayward Girls about a Magdalene laundry. “I’ve never shied away from dealing with controversial subjects in my books,” she told LibraryThing in 2025. Several novels mix in a second, older story, through a cookbook, a historian’s research or a family archive.
She works slowly by hand: the first draft is written in longhand with a fountain pen. Her years writing historical romance show in her structure, with a love story always running alongside the family story, and in her series, where minor characters from one book become the leads of the next.
Frequently asked questions about Susan Wiggs’s books
How many books has Susan Wiggs written?
More than fifty novels since her first, Texas Wildflower, in 1987, plus novellas and anthology stories. Ten are the key books on this page, from The Charm School (1999) to Wayward Girls (2025); the others are listed under “Everything else”.
What are Susan Wiggs’s books in order?
The key books are The Charm School (1999), The Mistress (2000), Summer at Willow Lake (2006), The Apple Orchard (2013), Family Tree (2016), Map of the Heart (2017), The Oysterville Sewing Circle (2019), The Lost and Found Bookshop (2020), Sugar and Salt (2022) and Wayward Girls (2025).
Where should I start with Susan Wiggs?
With Summer at Willow Lake (2006), the first Lakeshore Chronicles novel. If you would rather not start a long series, Family Tree (2016) or The Oysterville Sewing Circle (2019) stand on their own.
What is Susan Wiggs’s most famous book?
Her best-known work is the Lakeshore Chronicles, which begins with Summer at Willow Lake. Of her stand-alone novels, Family Tree and The Oysterville Sewing Circle are the best known.
What order are the Lakeshore Chronicles in?
Summer at Willow Lake (2006), The Winter Lodge (2007), Dockside (2007), Snowfall at Willow Lake (2008), Fireside (2009), Lakeshore Christmas (2009), The Summer Hideaway (2010), Marrying Daisy Bellamy (2011), Return to Willow Lake (2012), Candlelight Christmas (2013) and Starlight on Willow Lake (2015): eleven novels, all set in Avalon, New York.
Are The Lost and Found Bookshop and Sugar and Salt connected?
Yes. Both are set on Perdita Street in San Francisco; the bookshop from the 2020 novel is across the street from the kitchen and bakery in Sugar and Salt (2022). Each has its own lead, so either can be read alone, but the bookshop novel comes first.
Have any Susan Wiggs books been adapted for film or television?
Not on screen so far as this guide could confirm. Her 2019 author biography said The Apple Orchard was being made into a film and that the Lakeshore Chronicles had been optioned for a series.
Has Susan Wiggs won any awards?
Yes. She won Romance Writers of America’s RITA Award for The Mistress (Best Short Historical, 2001) and Lakeside Cottage (2006); her publisher describes her as a three-time RITA winner. She has also received Career Achievement Awards from Romantic Times.
Is Wayward Girls based on a true story?
Yes. It draws on the former Good Shepherd home on Best Street in Buffalo, New York, a Magdalene laundry where young women were sent to be “reformed” and put to work. Wiggs grew up in a small town near Buffalo.
Where does Susan Wiggs live?
On Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, Washington. Her author biography says that in good weather she goes to her writers’ group by motorboat.
Footnotes
- Susan Wiggs — Wikipedia
- Author interview: Susan Wiggs — LibraryThing, 2025
- Susan Wiggs biography — BookBrowse
- Susan Wiggs — Romance Wiki, University of Birmingham
- Map of the Heart — Publishers Weekly
- The Lost and Found Bookshop — Kirkus Reviews
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I write my first draft in longhand, using a fountain pen with peacock blue ink.”
— Susan Wiggs, LibraryThing author interview (2025)
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