Edward Rutherfurd Books in Order

If you want to sample his big English sagas: Sarum → London → The Forest
If you're interested in Irish history: Dublin → The Rebels of Ireland
If you love city-spanning stories: New York → Paris → China
If you prefer a single self-contained epic: Russka

Edward Rutherfurd was born Francis Edward Wintle in 1948 in the cathedral city of Salisbury in southern England. Growing up in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral and the prehistoric stones of nearby Salisbury Plain gave him a lifelong feel for place and deep time. The landscape around him would later become the heart of his first and most personal novel.

He was educated locally before studying at the University of Cambridge and later at Stanford Business School in California, where he held a Sloan fellowship. Those years in two very different university worlds, English and American, quietly fed his interest in how past and present overlap.

For years he tried to write in the margins of other jobs, starting and abandoning early novels and plays. In 1983 he finally left the book trade, moved back to his childhood landscape, and committed himself to a huge project that would become Sarum.

Sarum appeared in 1987, telling ten thousand years of English history through a handful of families living around Stonehenge and Salisbury. The book became an international bestseller, spent months on bestseller lists, and set the pattern for the big, place‑based epics he would write next.

Rutherfurd followed it with Russka, which traces Russian history across eighteen centuries, and London, a panoramic novel that runs from the Roman invasion to the late twentieth century. He went back to the New Forest of his youth in The Forest, exploring nearly a millennium of life in that ancient woodland.

His so‑called Dublin Saga—published as Dublin and The Rebels of Ireland—turns the same multi‑family lens on Irish history, from the days before Saint Patrick through conquest, famine, and the struggle for independence. Later novels such as New York, Paris, and China extend the approach to other cities and cultures, following fictional families through centuries of real events.

A hallmark of his work is the way he blends meticulous research with everyday detail. He works closely with historians, travels to the places he writes about, and then lets invented families carry readers through wars, revolutions, religious conflict, and quieter domestic dramas. Readers often meet merchants, craftsmen, priests, rebels, and rulers in the same book, all shaped by the same stretch of ground.

Over the years his books have sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into many languages. New York won a prize for American historical fiction and a literary medal from a long‑established New York society, and he later received an international honour from a Spanish city known for celebrating historical novels.

Rutherfurd has strong ties to Salisbury, where a walkway near the medieval market square bears his name, and he is a life member of local heritage groups linked to the cathedral and civic history. He has also made a home in Ireland and spent long stretches in North America, often dividing his year between the two continents.

These days he divides his time between writing, travelling, and family life. When he is not immersed in archives or drafting another panoramic chapter, he enjoys theatre, tennis, and the slower rhythm that sits behind his sweeping stories.