H. S. Cross

books are worlds

reading takes you inside

Novels

Amanda cover

Amanda

England in the 1920s is a nation in turmoil, its foundations shaken by the Great War and the collapse of genteel Edwardian society. The streets are haunted by shell-shocked men, runaways, mutilated veterans, damned poets, and revolutionaries. Marion has fled Galway for Oxford after her elopement with a violent man ended violently. In the City of Dreaming Spires, where the cobbled streets, barely lit pubs, and underground book presses hum with restless energy, she meets Jamie, a damaged soul like her who is struggling to recover from his experiences at the front. He alone sees her scars. She alone knows his secret name. Their love is wild, dangerous, and absolute. Everything, it seems, is at stake. At once an erotic drama, a formally inventive romantic epic, and a historical novel written with an emotional intensity, Amanda is a poignant, atmospheric meditation on love, trauma, and redemption.

Coming September 23, 2025

Grievous

Set in 1931 at St. Stephen’s Academy, a boys’ boarding school in Yorkshire, Grievous focuses on teacher John Grieves (nicknamed Grievous) and his student Gray Riding. Gray begins a secret correspondence with John’s 13-year-old goddaughter, Cordelia, while John is in love with her mother. The action—at the Academy and across England and the Continent—includes love, betrayal, illness, grief, Quakers, morphine, theater, and second chances.

Wilberforce

England, 1926. At St. Stephen’s Academy, the students are on the verge of revolt. While the younger boys plot an insurrection, the older ones are preoccupied with sneaking out-of-bounds, thrashing each other, tearing each other’s clothes off—or some combination of the three. Morgan Wilberforce, for one, can’t take it any longer.
Wilberforce is an indelible portrait of a young man caught between lust and cruelty, grief and God, frustrated love and abject longing.

“If you had told me, earlier this year, that I would be immersed in not one but two long novels set in an English boarding school, I would have scoffed. If you had told me that I would be looking forward to the author’s next book . . . I would have been incredulous. Such is the power of a writer like H. S. Cross.”

John Wilson, National Review

About

H. S. Cross

H. S. Cross was raised in Michigan and lived many years in New York City. She has taught grades 2-12, and many of her formative experiences involved being semi-lost in the countrysides of England, Ireland, and Scotland. She currently lives in Savannah, Georgia.

photograph of H.S. Cross

More

Essays

Conversations