Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Gracie’s War | 2013 | Elaine Everest | Buy |
| 2 | The Butlins Girls | 2017 | Elaine Everest | Buy |
| 3 | The Patchwork Girls | 2021 | Elaine Everest | Buy |
Gracie’s War (2013) was Elaine Everest’s debut novel and established the wartime Kent setting that she would return to across her career. It follows Gracie, a young woman navigating the Second World War on the home front, and it has the warmth and community focus that characterise all her fiction. The novel showed that her later Woolworths series was not a departure but an expansion of what she had already been building.
The Butlins Girls (2017) shifts the setting slightly, following workers at a Butlins holiday camp in the years after the war, when the camps were booming as a form of affordable entertainment for working-class families. The Patchwork Girls (2021) uses a sewing circle as its community hub, again during the war years. Together the three books form a complementary set of standalone wartime stories for readers who prefer finished, self-contained novels to the commitment of a twelve-book series.