The Hathaways in Order: Five Siblings, One Accidental Title

The five books are titled for the hours of a day and read in that sequence — midnight, sunrise, twilight, morning, afternoon — which is charming and also mildly confusing, so here it is plainly: Mine Till Midnight, then Seduce Me at Sunrise, then Tempt Me at Twilight, then Married by Morning, then Love in the Afternoon. Below, though, we have sorted them by sibling, because the Hathaways are the sort of family you get to know as people rather than as instalments.

Amelia — the one holding it all together

Mine Till Midnight opens with the eldest sister running a family she cannot afford on nerve alone, and with Cam Rohan, a half-Romany manager of a gaming club, who has money and freedom and no interest in the settled life she represents. The book does two jobs at once: it gives Amelia her romance and it installs the entire supporting cast — the dying sister, the wild youngest, the brother drinking himself into the ground. Do not skip it. Everything after is built on this foundation.

Win — the one who was supposed to die

Seduce Me at Sunrise belongs to Winnifred, an invalid after scarlet fever, and to Kev Merripen, the Romany man the family took in as a boy and who has loved her silently and furiously ever since. This is the angstiest book in the run by a distance: years of denial, a hero convinced he is not fit to touch her, and a heroine who returns from a French clinic determined to stop being handled with care. If you like your romance to hurt first, this is your entry.

Poppy — the one who wanted something ordinary

Tempt Me at Twilight is the odd, sharp one. Poppy wants a conventional life and a conventional husband, and instead gets Harry Rutledge — a hotelier who engineers her ruin because he has decided he wants her, and who then has to live with a wife who knows exactly what he did. Kleypas does not rush his redemption, and the hotel setting gives the book a wholly different texture from the country-house novels around it.

Leo — the one everybody wrote off

Married by Morning is the fan favourite, and the reason is structural: Leo has spent four books being the most exasperating man in the series, and Catherine Marks, his sisters' companion, has spent four books trading vicious little insults with him. The book turns those four books of friction into the payoff, and hands both of them secrets that reframe everything you thought you had seen. Grief, ruin, recovery, and the best banter Kleypas has written.

Beatrix — the one with the hedgehog

Love in the Afternoon closes the series with the youngest Hathaway, who collects injured animals and has no social instincts whatsoever, writing letters to a soldier in the Crimea on a friend's behalf and falling in love through the correspondence. When Christopher Phelan comes home damaged and looking for the woman whose letters kept him alive, the deception has to unravel. It is a Cyrano story with a war-trauma spine, and it is far more moving than the premise suggests.

Why this series sits apart

Two of the five heroes are Romany, in a genre that in 2007 rarely put non-aristocratic outsiders at the centre of the frame, and Kleypas takes their exclusion seriously rather than as decoration. The family's poverty is real, Leo's alcoholism is real, Win's illness is real. There are fewer ballrooms here than in the Wallflowers and more crumbling estates, gaming clubs and hotels. Readers who bounce off the marriage-mart machinery of Regency romance often find this is the Kleypas series that takes.

Where the Hathaways turn up later

Kleypas keeps her worlds porous. Members of this family appear in passing in the Ravenels books, by which point Cam and Merripen are established men of business rather than outsiders. None of that is required in either direction; it is a reward for reading widely rather than a dependency.