Alex George Books in Order

If you want the big family saga: A Good American
If you want a moving coming-of-age story: Setting Free the Kites
If you want historical Paris in one vivid day: The Paris Hours
If you want the earlier relationship comedies: Working It Out → Before Your Very Eyes → Love You Madly → Wonderful You

Alex George was born in England and came to writing by a crooked route. He studied law at Oxford, spent eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris, and moved to the United States in 2003. He was a serious reader long before he was a novelist, but for a while the law looked like the clearer path.

It started with irritation.

In the 1990s, while working long hours in London, he went through a streak of novels he thought were terrible. He kept grumbling that he could do better, until a friend finally told him to prove it. So he bought a computer, got up early, and started writing before the workday began. What started as a dare slowly became the thing he cared most about.

His first four novels were published in the UK, and you can already see the shape of his interests there. Working It Out, Before Your Very Eyes, Love You Madly, and Wonderful You are sharp relationship novels full of awkward longing, music, and people trying to untangle the trouble they have made for themselves. They lean funny, but there is usually a bruise under the joke.

A Good American, published in 2012, gave him a much bigger stage. The novel follows the Meisenheimer family from their arrival in Missouri and stretches across generations, with music humming through nearly every page. Readers tend to love its warmth, its family sprawl, and its interest in what it means to become American without leaving the old country entirely behind. It became a national and international bestseller, was a #1 Indie Next pick, and landed on Library Journal's best books of the year list.

He followed that with Setting Free the Kites, a coming-of-age novel set in coastal Maine in the 1970s. At the center are Robert Carter and Nathan Tilly, two boys whose friendship carries them through grief, first love, summer jobs at a worn-out amusement park, and the hard knowledge that hope can rescue you or mislead you. The book won the Missouri Prize for Fiction in 2018. It also shows something George does especially well: he writes boys and men with warmth, humor, and a clear eye for how fragile bravado can be.

Then he turned to Paris.

The Paris Hours moves through a single day in 1927 and follows four ordinary people in a city crowded with artists, writers, and ghosts. A maid with a missing notebook, an Armenian puppeteer, a broke painter, and a journalist carrying private pain all move toward the same point of collision. The novel became an instant national bestseller. Across George's books, certain things keep returning: music, migration, found family, reinvention, and the odd comedy that can sit right beside grief. His settings matter too, whether it is small-town Missouri, a rundown Maine amusement park, or the side streets of interwar Paris.

George's life off the page is full of books as well. He founded the Unbound Book Festival in Columbia, Missouri, and opened Skylark Bookshop there, a store that became a real part of the town's literary life. He has written essays and criticism for major outlets, and in 2022 he was named Midwest Bookseller of the Year. He has also kept working as an attorney, which may explain some of the practical intelligence that runs through even his most generous fiction.

These days he lives in Boston, where he is a writer in residence at Emerson College and teaches creative writing and literature. He still keeps close ties to Skylark and to the Unbound Book Festival, and he continues to move between writing, teaching, bookselling, and law. His novels have been translated into more than ten languages. It is an unusual mix, but it suits him. His career has never looked especially straight, and that may be part of why his novels feel so alive to detours, second chances, and the strange ways people build a home.