Erin Bartels Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Erin Bartels is a published author who has won awards for her work.

She is known for writing character driven fiction for readers who are curious. Those who read her books know to expect that each of her books will tell a unique story about characters who are real and fallible, so real that it’s hard to believe that they don’t exist in real life.

Her settings are able to come alive with all of the careful details that engage the senses and help to transport readers to a time and place of the author’s choosing. Her themes of reckoning with the past, making the present better, and looking to the future with hope leaves her readers with a sense of peace and possibility.

She is the author of multiple books that include We Hope For better Things, All That We Carried, Everything Is Just Beginning, the Girl Who Could Breathe Underwater, and more. She has been a finalist for a Christy two times and won two WFWA Star Awards as well as three Michigan Notable Book Awards.

Erin has worked as a publishing professional for over twenty years. She spent 18 years living in Michigan’s capital city but now lives with her family in a small town that is surrounded by pasture lands and farm fields. Readers can subscribe to her newsletter on Substack (Erin Bartels Writes). She also writes weekly writing prompts and posts on the craft and the business on her Experimental Wolves Substack. You can find her on Facebook and Instagram as well.

Everything Is Just Beginning is a 2023 novel from Erin Bartels. Pick up a copy and check out this immersive story that is all about music, the struggle, and how to start over.

The main character in this story from the award-winning author is Michael Sullivan. He is talented at writing lyrics and is good at guitar, but ever since he was rejected by his band and kicked out of his apartment, he is starting to doubt whether he will ever be able to get a record deal.

He lives with his underachieving uncle in a trailer that is pretty beat up and works a dead-end job. Thanks to this, Michael doesn’t really have any reason to hope that there is a better future waiting for him. But things seem to have the potential to change and turn around when an invitation for a fancy New Year’s Eve party appears in his mailbox.

The invitation is for his uncle, and he shares his name with him. However, the uncle is going out of town, and there might be no harm in taking his place at this party. Or at least not much.

On the night of December 31, 1989, a lot is happening. The Soviet Union is slowly getting closer to democracy, the Berlin Wall is being taken down, and it seems like anything is possible. Michael has no idea that he is about to cross paths with a mysterious and accomplished young heir who is beholden to a fading musical dynasty in a meeting that has the potential to change the course of both of their futures forever.

The Lady with the Dark Hair is a 2024 novel from Erin Bartels. This is the story of two souls who are lonely who might end up having just what the other one requires if they can turn their focus from what is concluding to what is beginning.

Esther Markstrom is the descendant of the painter Francisco Vella, and she and her artist mother have always been proud of that fact. To that extent, they run a small museum and gallery that is all about raising awareness of his work which they think is severely underappreciated.

When Esther reconnects with her old art history professor, she discovers that her family history was once solid but now stands on shaky ground as questions start to come up about Vella’s most revered work, which happened to be a portrait called ‘The Lady with the Dark Hair’.

Meanwhile in 1879, the Catalan orphan who is now a fugitive named Viviana Torrens has been able to track down sanctuary by serving an aging artist in their home in southern France. It is in this very studio that she meets a man named Francisco Vella, a Gibraltian merchant who sells artists’ pigments.

When something from her past catches up to her, she comes up with the plan to pose as his sister and join him on his travels or else be deported back to Spain to stand trial. On her way along in this journey, she will find out that the many parts she has been playing in order to hide her identity will have implications that are far-reaching that she never could have seen coming.

Follow along on this dual-timeline story from Erin Bartels as the award winning author takes readers from the Midwest to the Mediterranean on a search for identity, truth, and the liberty to go after your dreams and find out what happens on both timelines by getting a copy of this book!