Authors Like Ariel Lawhon

Kate Quinn

American · The Alice Network (2017), The Rose Code (2021), The Briar Club (2024)

Quinn writes women in wartime intelligence work, usually braiding two timelines and building to something structured like a thriller. The Alice Network uses the real First World War spy ring run by Louise de Bettignies; The Rose Code follows three women at Bletchley Park through codebreaking and its aftermath, including the psychiatric hospital one of them ends up in; The Diamond Eye (2022) is the Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko. She trained as a classicist and wrote four novels set in ancient Rome before moving to the twentieth century.

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

American · A Midwife's Tale (1990), Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History (2007)

Ulrich spent years with the diary Martha Ballard kept between 1785 and 1812 — nearly ten thousand entries that previous historians had dismissed as trivial — and reconstructed from it the economy, the medicine and the sexual politics of a Maine town. A Midwife's Tale won the Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize in 1991 and was filmed for American Experience. She taught at Harvard for two decades. The phrase about well-behaved women, now printed on a great deal of merchandise, comes from an academic article she published in 1976.

Marie Benedict

American · The Only Woman in the Room (2019), The Mystery of Mrs. Christie (2020)

Benedict practised law for a decade before writing novels that each take a woman written out of a famous story: Mileva Marić in The Other Einstein, Hedy Lamarr in The Only Woman in the Room, Agatha Christie's eleven-day disappearance in 1926 in The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. The Personal Librarian (2021), written with Victoria Christopher Murray, is about Belle da Costa Greene, who built J. P. Morgan's library while passing as white. Her books are fixtures of American book clubs.

Paula McLain

American · The Paris Wife (2011), Circling the Sun (2015)

The Paris Wife tells the 1920s from inside Hadley Richardson's marriage to Ernest Hemingway and sold in the millions. Circling the Sun does the same for Beryl Markham, the aviator and racehorse trainer who flew the Atlantic east to west in 1936. Love and Ruin (2018) returns to Hemingway through Martha Gellhorn, who was a war correspondent long before and long after him. McLain grew up in foster care in California and began as a poet, which shows in the sentences.

Geraldine Brooks

Australian-American · Year of Wonders (2001), March (2005), Horse (2022)

Brooks covered the Middle East and Africa for The Wall Street Journal before turning to fiction. Year of Wonders is set in the Derbyshire village that quarantined itself during the plague of 1666; March, which imagines the absent father of Little Women at the front, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006; Horse braids the story of the nineteenth-century racehorse Lexington and his enslaved groom with a present-day scientist and art historian. She published a memoir about the sudden death of her husband, the writer Tony Horwitz, in 2025.

Fiona Davis

American · The Dollhouse (2016), The Lions of Fifth Avenue (2020), The Magnolia Palace (2022)

Davis builds each novel around a New York landmark and runs two timelines through it: the Barbizon Hotel for Women, the New York Public Library and the apartment inside it, the Frick mansion, Radio City Music Hall. The buildings are real, the floor plans matter, and the research into who was permitted where and when does most of the plot's work. She trained as an actor and worked as a magazine editor before writing fiction.

Kristin Hannah

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

Hannah practised law before writing more than twenty novels. The Nightingale follows two sisters in occupied France, one of them modelled loosely on the escape-line organiser Andrée de Jongh, and has sold in the millions worldwide. The Four Winds moves to the Dust Bowl; The Women follows an American combat nurse in Vietnam and the country that refused to acknowledge that women had served. She writes deliberately for a wide audience and is routinely criticised for sentimentality by reviewers her readers do not read.

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Kate Morton

Australian · The Forgotten Garden (2008), The Lake House (2015), Homecoming (2023)

Morton writes long novels in which a present-day woman uncovers a family secret buried decades or a century earlier, usually attached to a house: a Cornish cottage, an abandoned estate in Cornwall, a South Australian property where a mother and her children were found dead on Christmas Eve in 1959. Her books have sold well over ten million copies and have been translated into more than forty languages. She trained in drama and wrote a doctorate on tragedy in nineteenth-century fiction.

Anya Seton

American · Dragonwyck (1944), Katherine (1954)

Katherine is the story of Katherine Swynford, the governess who became John of Gaunt's mistress and eventually his wife, and whose descendants took the English throne; Seton worked from the medieval record and the novel has stayed in print for seventy years. Dragonwyck became a 1946 film with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price. She was the daughter of the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton, researched obsessively, and was writing documented women back into the story decades before it had a marketing category.

Hilary Mantel

British · Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012), The Mirror & the Light (2020)

Mantel won the Booker Prize twice, for the first two volumes of a trilogy narrated from inside Thomas Cromwell's head in the present tense, with no dual timeline, no modern framing and very little explanation offered to the reader. She wrote fiction for twenty-five years before it, including a novel about the French Revolution written in her twenties that took decades to be published. Her 2013 London Review of Books lecture on royal bodies, which discussed how the Duchess of Cambridge was being presented in public, was reported as a personal attack and caused a lasting row. She died in 2022.

Every book by Hilary Mantel →