Woolworths books in order

Reading order

The Woolworths Girls began as a single novel and grew into one of the most sustained wartime saga series in British fiction. The story starts in 1938 as young women from different backgrounds take jobs at the Erith branch of Woolworths, and the series follows them through the years of rationing, bombing, loss, and the particular solidarity that wartime Britain produced among working women. Elaine Everest based the series in the Kent town she knows well, and the local detail gives the books a grounded authenticity that readers in the genre tend to respond to strongly.

By the time of the twelfth book, New Horizons for the Woolworths Girls (2025), the series has moved well into the post-war period, following characters through marriage, motherhood, and the changes that came with peacetime. Christmas-themed entries appear regularly across the sequence (Carols at Woolworths, Christmas at Woolworths, A Christmas Wish at Woolworths), reflecting the seasonal popularity of wartime fiction. The scale of the series, twelve books over nearly a decade, gives it something that shorter series cannot match: the sense of watching characters grow up and grow old across a whole community.