Mary Chamberlain Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Mary Chamberlain is a published novelist and a historian of Britain and the Caribbean.

She was born in London and studied politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh and then the London School of Economics. She has worked with oral history and life story methods in 1995, publishing quite a lot on women’s and Caribbean history.

Mary is an Emeritus Professor of Caribbean History at Oxford Brookes University. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and is a Trustee of the National Life Story Collection in the National Sound Archive of the British Library.

She is known for writing the novel The Dressmaker of Dachau, which came out under that title in 2015 in the United Kingdom. It was an international best seller and sold to nineteen countries. It was released in the United States in 2016 under the title The Dressmaker’s War.

Her second novel is titled The Hidden and it came out in 2019. It was a Must Reads pick by the Sunday Times for best recent books. She would follow that up with novels like The Forgotten, picked as one of the top historical fiction releases for the month by the Sunday Times, and also released The Lie.

Her novel The Mighty Jester came out in 2014 in the United States and was named third place in the 2013 Literature Works first page award. Her book Fenwomen: A Portrait of women in an English Village was also the basis for Fen, an award-winning play by Caryl Churchill.

The Dressmaker’s War is a historical fiction novel by Mary Chamberlain. This is a powerful and gripping story of an English dressmaker who gets caught in Germany while World War II was in progress. It goes over the choices that she has to make in order to stay alive, as well as the way that she takes on those choices in the aftermath of the war.

The time is 1939 and the place is London. Ada Vaughan is a young lady who has a talent for making dresses and is dreaming of going off to a better life. It appears that the chance to have that better life seems to come along when she meets Stanislaus.

Stanislaus is an Austrian aristocrat. He manages to sweep Ada off of her feet and takes her to Paris. But when war breaks out he goes missing and Ada is taken prisoner by the Germans. She has to do all that she can manage in order to survive and so decides to make herself useful and become a dressmaker for the Nazi wives.

All on her own as the war goes on, Ada has no way of knowing that the choices that she is making will come back years later to haunt her. After the war ends, her experience is distorted. Going from the hotels of London to the cafes of Paris to the desperate air that swept through wartime Germany, this historical novel is sure to keep the reader turning pages from the beginning to get to the end in this historically-inspired story from Mary Chamberlain.

The Hidden is a 2019 novel by Mary Chamberlain. If you have been looking for a historical fiction novel to read and are tired of the same old thing, switch it all up by getting a copy of this book!

Dora, Joe, and Geoffrey are all happy in retirement and living out their years in comfort. But they suddenly find that their lives are torn apart when Barbara Hummel arrives. She is a young German lady who has a mission to try and find the identity of a woman who she has found in a photograph among her mother’s possessions.

As they gradually get to the bottom of the truth of what happened under the occupation, the lives of Dora and Joe start to unravel in ways that are surprising. Dora is a Jewish refugee and Joe is a Catholic priest. Slowly, the consequences of the lives that they had under the Germans and the lies that came after prove to be as devastating as they are unexpected.

A story of abandonment and love, shame and survival, this is a provocative story that you won’t want to miss. Check out The Hidden to catch all of the details for yourself and experience a tale that is worthy of a movie!