Runnymede

About the Runnymede series

Runnymede is Rita Mae Brown's family-saga series set in the twin towns of Runnymede, Maryland and South Runnymede, Pennsylvania, split by the Mason-Dixon line and by generations of the same families who keep marrying, feuding, and burying each other on either side of the state border. Unlike Brown's mystery series, these are multi-generational literary novels — comic, sprawling, and unapologetically Southern-gothic in their appetite for eccentric relatives, long-buried secrets, and small-town social hierarchy — following the interlocking Hunsenmeir and Chalfonte families across more than a century, from the Civil War's long shadow through the twentieth century.

The five novels don't all sit in a single chronological line: Six of One (1978), the series opener, spans from 1909 to the 1980s across three generations of women in the Hunsenmeir family, while later entries move both backward and forward from that anchor point to fill out the wider family tree and the town's history. Brown's own upbringing in a small Pennsylvania border town informs the setting closely, and the books share her freewheeling comic voice — barbed dialogue, unsentimental affection for difficult women, and a real fondness for the pettiness and loyalty of small-town life. This is the series for readers who want Brown's sharpest satirical voice applied to family and place rather than to a mystery plot.

How to read this series

Publication order is the practical way to read Runnymede, though the novels aren't strictly sequential in story time — this is a family saga told out of chronological order across multiple books rather than one continuous timeline. Start with Six of One (1978), which introduces the Hunsenmeir sisters and establishes the twin-towns setting; Bingo (1988) is its direct sequel, picking up the same characters decades later. Loose Lips (1999), The Sand Castle (2008), and Cakewalk (2016) expand the family tree further, filling in earlier generations and additional relatives rather than continuing straight on from where Bingo ends. Each book stands reasonably well alone as a portrait of the town and its families, but reading in publication order is the closest thing to an intended path through the saga.