Francine Rivers books in order

Francine Rivers (born 1947) is an American novelist who moved from mainstream historical romance to Christian fiction, and is best known for Redeeming Love (1991).

Rivers studied English and journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, and worked as a newspaper reporter before her first novel was published in 1976. Through the late 1970s and 1980s she wrote historical romances for the general market, among them Kathleen (1979), Sycamore Hill (1981), This Golden Valley (1983) and Not So Wild a Dream (1985), which won a Golden Medallion award in 1986.

She became a born-again Christian in 1986, and after three years without writing she turned to faith-based fiction. Redeeming Love, published by Bantam in 1991, sets the Old Testament story of Hosea in the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. The Mark of the Lion trilogy followed: A Voice in the Wind (1993), An Echo in the Darkness (1994) and As Sure as the Dawn (1995), with the five-book Lineage of Grace series in 2000 and 2001. She won RITA Awards for inspirational romance in 1995, 1996 and 1997, joined the RWA Hall of Fame in 1997, and received a lifetime achievement award from American Christian Fiction Writers in 2015. Her books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and Redeeming Love was filmed in 2022 with Rivers as executive producer and screenwriter.

For collectors

The book to look for is the 1991 Bantam first edition of Redeeming Love. When it went out of print Rivers recovered the rights and issued a revised text through Multnomah in 1997, adding a baptism scene and making the heroine's conversion explicit, so the Bantam printing preserves the original version. Her pre-1986 general-market romances are a separate, earlier strand of her work.