Reading List

Authors Like Lisa Wingate

Rill Foss is twelve when she is taken from her family’s shantyboat on the Mississippi River. The agency that takes her was real: Georgia Tann’s Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, which took more than 5,000 children before a state investigation closed it in 1950. Lisa Wingate, a former journalist who grew up in Oklahoma, published Before We Were Yours in 2017; it has sold more than four million copies, and in 2019 she and Judy Christie followed it with Before and After, the true stories of Tann adoptees and their birth families. Her later novels work the same way. The Book of Lost Friends (2020) is built on the ‘Lost Friends’ advertisements freed people placed in Southern newspapers after the Civil War; Shelterwood (2024) follows children in 1909 Oklahoma caught up in profitable guardianships. The ten writers below share that method: a buried injustice, told through one child or one family.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Historical fiction · Hidden history · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

The closest matches are Christina Baker Kline, whose Orphan Train follows a child sent west on the trains that carried destitute children to the Midwest, Kristina McMorris, whose Sold on a Monday grew from a 1948 newspaper photo of four children offered for sale, and Kate Morton, who pairs a modern woman with a family secret from the past. The list also includes the non-fiction behind a famous forced adoption, Charles Dickens, and writers who tell American history from inside the communities it happened to.

10 authors like Lisa Wingate

01
The orphan trains

Christina Baker Kline

American, born in England · Orphan Train (2013), A Piece of the World (2017), The Exiles (2020)

Kline was born in Cambridge, England, in 1964. Orphan Train moves between present-day Mount Desert Island in Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, and draws on the real orphan trains that carried thousands of orphaned, abandoned and destitute children from the East Coast to the Midwest between 1854 and 1929.

Kline is the nearest match to Before We Were Yours: a real system that moved children away from their families, and an older woman who finally tells a younger one what happened. Read her next.

— Lisanne
02
Children for sale

Kristina McMorris

American · Sold on a Monday (2018), The Ways We Hide (2023), The Girls of Good Fortune (2025)

McMorris, from Burien, Washington, found an old photograph of four siblings beside a sign reading ‘4 children for sale’, published in 1948 with a caption about a Chicago family’s desperation. Sold on a Monday, set in 1931, follows the reporter whose photo of children like them makes his career, and became a million-copy bestseller.

McMorris and Wingate both start from a documented case of children treated as property and ask what drove the adults around them. Her novel adds a question Wingate leaves aside: what the person who tells the story owes the family in it.

— Lisanne
03
The family secret, two timelines

Kate Morton

Australian · The House at Riverton (2006), The Forgotten Garden (2008), The Secret Keeper (2012)

Morton was born in Berri, South Australia. Her novels, from The House at Riverton to Homecoming (2023), follow women who uncover what an earlier generation hid. A new novel, Christabel, is listed for 2027.

Morton uses the same structure as Before We Were Yours: a woman in the present who unpicks a secret about where a family really came from. She is the non-American choice here, with English and Australian family houses in place of Southern rivers.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kate Morton →

04
Women under historical pressure

Kristin Hannah

American · The Nightingale (2015), The Four Winds (2021), The Women (2024)

Hannah was born in California in 1960. The Nightingale follows two sisters in occupied France, The Four Winds a family in the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and The Women an Army nurse in the Vietnam War. A film of The Nightingale is scheduled for February 2027.

Hannah writes for the same readers as Wingate: women and families tested by a real historical crisis, told with strong emotion. She works with the large events of history, where Wingate digs up the forgotten ones.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kristin Hannah →

05
The true story of a forced adoption

Martin Sixsmith

British · The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009)

Sixsmith, born in Warrington in 1954, was a BBC foreign correspondent and later a government director of communications. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee tells how nuns at Sean Ross Abbey in Ireland separated Philomena Lee from her son, Michael Hess, in the 1950s, and how mother and son tried to find each other. It became the 2013 film Philomena, with Judi Dench.

This is the non-fiction counterpart to Rill Foss’s story, from the other side of the Atlantic: an institution that took children from poor mothers, and the decades the families spent searching. Read it alongside Before and After.

— Lisanne
06
The guardianship crimes, reported

David Grann

American · The Lost City of Z (2009), Killers of the Flower Moon (2017), The Wager (2023)

Grann, born in 1968, is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Killers of the Flower Moon investigates the murders of members of the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma, after oil made the tribe rich, and the birth of the FBI. The Wager reconstructs an eighteenth-century shipwreck and mutiny.

Grann documents the Oklahoma that Shelterwood imagines: Native wealth, white guardians and the killings that followed. Read him for the record behind the novel.

— Lisanne

Every book by David Grann →

07
Native history from inside

Louise Erdrich

American, Turtle Mountain Chippewa · Love Medicine (1984), The Round House (2012), The Night Watchman (2020)

Erdrich, born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954, is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. The Round House won the National Book Award in 2012. The Night Watchman, about the campaign against a congressional bill to end the federal recognition of tribes, was inspired by her grandfather, a tribal chairman, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021.

Erdrich complicates the list: she writes Native history from inside her own nation and its politics, not as a hidden scandal waiting to be uncovered. Read her after Shelterwood for a Native novelist’s view of the same century.

— Lisanne

Every book by Louise Erdrich →

08
Families separated by slavery

Yaa Gyasi

Ghanaian-American · Homegoing (2016), Transcendent Kingdom (2020)

Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989. Homegoing opens with two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana: one marries the British commander of Cape Coast Castle, the other is held in its dungeons and shipped into slavery. Alternating chapters follow their descendants across seven generations to the present-day United States.

Homegoing is the book to read after The Book of Lost Friends: both follow the families slavery tore apart. Gyasi tells it from the line of the enslaved and across centuries, a sharper and less consoling version of the same history.

— Lisanne

Every book by Yaa Gyasi →

09
The South, and who tells its story

Kathryn Stockett

American · The Help (2009), The Calamity Club (2026)

Stockett was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, the setting of The Help, about Black maids working in white households in the 1960s. Ablene Cooper, a housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, sued over a character she said used her likeness; the case was dismissed on the statute of limitations, and Stockett denied the claim. Her second novel, The Calamity Club, came out in May 2026.

Stockett and Wingate both tell Southern injustice partly through the eyes of the people it was done to, and both have won very large book-club audiences. The debate around The Help over who gets to tell whose story is worth having in mind when reading Wingate too.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kathryn Stockett →

10
Where the orphan novel began

Charles Dickens

English · Oliver Twist (1838), Bleak House (1853)

Dickens (1812–1870) put workhouses, criminal gangs and the courts at the centre of Victorian bestsellers. Oliver Twist follows an orphan from the workhouse into a London gang; Bleak House traces the damage a family secret and an endless court case do to the children caught in them.

Dickens predates the genre Wingate writes in and set its pattern: a child at the mercy of an institution, and a novel meant to make readers angry about it. Start with Oliver Twist.

— Lisanne

Every book by Charles Dickens →

Where to start if you loved Lisa Wingate

If you want another stolen childhood, read Christina Baker Kline.

Orphan Train (2013): a child sent west on the real orphan trains, and the teenager who hears her story.

If you want the true story of a forced adoption, read Martin Sixsmith.

The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009): an Irish mother and the son nuns took from her.

If you liked Shelterwood, read David Grann.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2017): the Osage murders in 1920s Oklahoma, reported.

If you liked The Book of Lost Friends, read Yaa Gyasi.

Homegoing (2016): two half-sisters and seven generations of their descendants.

If you want more Wingate, start with Before We Were Yours.

Then read Before and After (2019), the true stories of Tann adoptees, and Shelterwood (2024).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Lisa Wingate

Who writes like Lisa Wingate?

Christina Baker Kline, Kristina McMorris and Kate Morton are the closest: Kline and McMorris for real scandals involving children, Morton for the two-timeline family secret. Kristin Hannah suits readers who want large historical novels about women.

What should I read after Before We Were Yours?

Christina Baker Kline’s Orphan Train (2013) for fiction, and Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009) for a true story of a forced adoption. Wingate’s own Before and After (2019) tells the stories of real Tann adoptees.

Is Before We Were Yours a true story?

Rill Foss and her family are fictional, but the Tennessee Children’s Home Society and its director, Georgia Tann, were real. Tann’s agency in Memphis took more than 5,000 children before it was closed in 1950.

Does Lisa Wingate have a new book?

Her most recent novel is Shelterwood (2024). Since then she has published a short story, The Last Father-Daughter Dance, for Amazon Original Stories; no new novel had been announced by October 2026.

Which Lisa Wingate book should I read first?

Before We Were Yours (2017), her best-known novel and the clearest example of her method. If you prefer post-Civil War history, start with The Book of Lost Friends (2020).

Is Lisa Wingate like Kristin Hannah?

Both write bestselling historical novels about women and families under pressure. Hannah takes on large events such as the Second World War and the Dust Bowl; Wingate builds her novels on little-known scandals and usually pairs them with a present-day storyline.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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Every book by Lisa Wingate, in order →

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