Pennyroyal Green in Order: Everseas, Redmonds and the Long Game

The village, and the feud

Pennyroyal Green is a Sussex village with two great houses. The Everseas are charming, reckless, lucky, and slightly criminal; they get away with everything and everybody forgives them. The Redmonds are wealthy, disciplined, ambitious and cold; they get away with everything too, but nobody forgives them for it. The families have been at odds so long that the origin is folklore rather than history, and the village keeps a superstition about it: in each generation, one Eversea and one Redmond will fall in love, and it will end badly.

Julie Anne Long wrote ten novels inside that premise. Nine of them are complete romances about other people. The tenth is the one the superstition was about.

The ten novels

1. The Perils of Pleasure (2008) — Colin Eversea is rescued from the gallows in front of a crowd by a woman paid to do it. The village ballad about him is already being sung. An unusually plot-heavy opener.
2. Like No Other Lover (2008) — Miles Redmond, naturalist and second son, hosting a house party at which a beautiful fortune-hunter is very much not supposed to catch his eye.
3. Since the Surrender (2009) — Chase Eversea, a soldier with a limp and a grudge, and a woman from his past asking for help with a disappearance. The most sombre of the ten.
4. I Kissed an Earl (2010) — Violet Redmond, magnificently spoiled and quietly desperate, stows away on a ship hunting a pirate she believes is her missing brother. The first book to make the Lyon question urgent.
5. What I Did For a Duke (2011) — Alexander Moncrieffe arrives at the Everseas' to take revenge on the family and stays to spend a house party talking to Genevieve Eversea, who is quietly heartbroken about someone else. Widely regarded as one of the finest historical romances of the century so far.
6. How the Marquess Was Won (2012) — a paid companion and a marquess who wagers on her. Class, and the humiliation of being a guest in a house where you work.
7. A Notorious Countess Confesses (2012) — a former courtesan turned countess retreats to the village and finds the vicar is the one person who will not be scandalised. Tender, funny, and quietly furious about respectability.
8. It Happened One Midnight (2013) — Jonathan Redmond, the youngest and the one determined not to become his father, and a singer with a secret. The book where the Redmond patriarch's shadow gets longest.
9. Between the Devil and Ian Eversea (2014) — Ian Eversea, who has been flirting his way through nine books, meets an American heiress who is not remotely charmed.
10. The Legend of Lyon Redmond (2015) — Lyon and Olivia. The ballad, explained. The series' entire purpose, and a book that would be merely good in isolation and is devastating in position.

The long game, and why it changes the order advice

Most reading-order pages will tell you a series is "standalone but better in order". This one is different in a specific way. Lyon Redmond is absent from the first nine books — he left before the series began — and his absence is a hole the other characters keep walking around. Olivia Eversea, the girl he left, appears throughout as a minor figure who does charitable work with unusual intensity and refuses every proposal she receives. Book after book, you are given one more sliver.

Long wrote the payoff seven years after the setup began. It only pays if you were there. Reading The Legend of Lyon Redmond without the nine books underneath it is like hearing the last verse of a song you do not know.

Can you start with What I Did For a Duke?

Yes, and this is the one exception worth making. Book five is the book that converts people into Julie Anne Long readers, and it functions almost entirely on its own — the duke is an outsider to the feud, and Genevieve's heartbreak is explained within the novel. Plenty of readers begin there, love it, and go back to book one afterwards. What you lose is small; what you gain is knowing immediately whether this author's particular register — slow, watchful, extremely interior — is for you.

Where to go next

Long later wrote the Palace of Rogues series, set in a boarding house by the London docks, which shares the village-community feel with a rougher setting; Lady Derring Takes a Lover is its opener. Her full list is at the Julie Anne Long reading order. If what you want is another series with a genuine destination rather than a queue of instalments, the Rules of Scoundrels quartet is built the same way.