Abbi Waxman Books in Order

If you want her signature blend of humor and heart: The Garden of Small Beginnings → Other People's Houses.
If you love bookish romantic comedies: The Bookish Life of Nina Hill → Adult Assembly Required.
If you like family stories and road trips: I Was Told It Would Get Easier.
If you prefer her newest standalone stories: Christa Comes Out of Her Shell → One Death at a Time.

Abbi Waxman was born in England in 1970, the eldest child of two advertising copywriters. When her father left, her mother turned to crime fiction, building a writing career at the same time she was raising Abbi and her sister. Their house filled up with books, and reading became the family’s favorite language.

She eventually earned a degree in anthropology, a fitting choice for someone fascinated by how people live and relate to each other. All the while she kept devouring novels, especially crime and comedy, picking up a feel for pacing and punchy dialogue.

After graduation she followed her parents into advertising, working as a copywriter and later a creative director at large agencies in London and New York, learning how to distill character, conflict, and emotion into a few sharp lines.

Advertising proved to be both a training ground and a grind. Abbi spent years writing campaigns for banks, tech companies, and more than a few questionable brands. She also ghostwrote a celebrity novel and began scripting for American television, edging closer to the long-form stories she had watched her mother create at the kitchen table.

Eventually she left agency life, moved to Los Angeles, and focused on raising her three children. Fiction crept back in during the cracks of family life, at first in early mornings and odd scraps of time. What began as a way to carve out a little mental space turned into full-length novels.

Her debut, The Garden of Small Beginnings, introduces many of the things readers now associate with her work: a widowed single mother trying to rebuild after loss, a community gardening class that becomes an unlikely support group, and humor threaded through even the most painful moments.

Next came Other People's Houses, which peers into a carpool line and a close-knit neighborhood to see what really happens behind seemingly perfect front doors, and The Bookish Life of Nina Hill, about an anxious, book-obsessed trivia nerd whose quiet routines are upended by an unexpected inheritance and a sprawling new family. Both novels highlight Waxman’s affection for oddball side characters.

In I Was Told It Would Get Easier, she turns to a mother-daughter road trip, following a structured lawyer and her uncertain teen as a bus tour of East Coast colleges forces them into honest conversation. Adult Assembly Required revisits the world of Nina Hill through a young woman starting over in Los Angeles and learning to assemble a life from friends, housemates, and a slightly chaotic bookstore. Later novels like Christa Comes Out of Her Shell and One Death at a Time widen her canvas to include a reclusive marine scientist dragged into media glare and a darkly comic mystery built around sobriety and second chances.

Across these books, Waxman returns to certain themes: families that are chosen as often as inherited, the messiness of parenting, the strange comfort of hobbies, and the idea that second chances rarely arrive in a tidy package.

Abbi now lives in Los Angeles with her husband, three children, and a famously large menagerie of pets. She often writes in coffee shops early in the day, before regular life rushes in. That rhythm of quiet observation followed by domestic chaos shows up in her fiction, where characters juggle work, family, romance, and the odd existential crisis. Her novels invite readers to laugh, wince, and recognize pieces of their own lives, then close the cover feeling a little less alone.