Arlem Hawks Books in Order

Arlem Hawks was inventing stories before she was old enough to put them on paper. She grew up all over the western United States, and that mix of movement, family stories, and travel seems to have stayed with her. From an early age she wanted to be like her father, a writer, and she developed a lasting interest in the way places, cultures, and history shape the people living inside them.

At Brigham Young University, she studied communications with an emphasis in print journalism. She also studied French for seven years, which helps explain why France turns up so naturally in some of her fiction. After college she worked as a sports information director for BYU Athletics, handling media relations for football, women's basketball, and volleyball. It is a neat beginning for a novelist, organized, public-facing, and a long way from drawing rooms and warships.

Fiction took the scenic route back into her life. After moving with her husband to Arizona, she found herself home with small children in a place that still felt unfamiliar, and she returned to the stories that had always steadied her, Jane Austen, the Regency era, and the kind of historical romance where kindness matters as much as wit. That period of life pushed her from reader back to writer.

That return stuck.

Her first published book was the novella The Steadfast Heart, and it already showed many of the things readers now expect from her, emotional restraint, practical problems, and characters trying to rebuild after disappointment. Georgana's Secret followed as her first novel, putting a disguised heroine and a navy lieutenant aboard the HMS Deborah. It is a high-concept setup, but the appeal is not just the secret. It is the tenderness, the danger, and the sense that Hawks actually cares how life at sea worked.

She has kept widening that range without leaving her favorite concerns behind. Beyond the Lavender Fields and Along a Breton Shore move into revolutionary France, where romance has to survive political violence, divided loyalties, and people trying to do right in a world that keeps shifting under them. Even in those bigger historical settings, her stories stay close to individual choices. Readers who like history in their romance, but still want clear emotional stakes, tend to find a lot to like there.

The sea keeps calling her back.

That shows up again in shorter works like Commander of His Heart, and even in her contribution to A Lady's Wager, where officers, ships, and working lives sit right beside courtship. Across books, she seems especially interested in people whose futures are constrained by duty, class, money, reputation, or simple bad timing. Her heroines often have to be capable long before anyone rewards them for it. Her heroes are rarely idle charmers. They usually have jobs to do, consciences to answer to, and no easy path to happiness.

Now she lives in Arizona with her husband and three children. When she is not writing, she bakes food inspired by her characters, sews Regency dresses, paints with watercolors, and keeps learning the tin whistle. All of that fits. Her books feel made by someone who enjoys history not as museum glass, but as texture, craft, and daily life.