Beth Hoffman Books in Order

Beth Hoffman came to fiction after a long working life in design and visual art. Before she became a novelist, she led and co-owned a major interior design studio in Cincinnati, Ohio, and her paintings found homes in private and corporate collections in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The creative impulse started early. Hoffman wrote her first short story at eleven and sold her first painting at fourteen, but for a while writing stayed at the edge of her professional life. Design work, antiques, rooms, color, and the histories attached to everyday objects gave her plenty to notice.

While she ran the design studio, Hoffman also wrote narrative advertisements for furniture in newspapers and magazines. She invented little histories for the pieces, imagining who had loved them, lost them, stolen them, or argued over them in a divorce. Readers noticed. One caller said he and his wife had clipped the ads and put them on their refrigerator, then asked whether she had ever considered writing a book.

That call gave her a push. Hoffman sold her share of the business, left the design world, and gave herself fully to a novel. She spent nearly four years writing it.

It was a practical leap, and a personal one.

That novel was Saving CeeCee Honeycutt, published in 2010. It follows a twelve-year-old girl leaving a painful home life in Ohio for Savannah, where a group of women gives her room to grieve, grow, and feel cared for. The book became a New York Times bestseller, and its mix of Southern setting, offbeat humor, and chosen family drew many readers in.

Her 2013 follow-up, Looking for Me, returns to several interests close to Hoffman: Kentucky landscapes, antiques, family bonds, and the emotional weight of what gets left behind. Teddi Overman restores furniture and runs an antiques shop in Charleston while carrying the unanswered question of what happened to her brother Josh. The novel also became a New York Times bestseller and won the 2014 Ohioana Book Award for Fiction.

Hoffman's novels are standalones, but they have common ground. Both center women and girls making sense of family trouble, and both use Southern places as more than scenery. Savannah offers CeeCee an unfamiliar social world. Charleston, rural Kentucky, and Red River Gorge hold Teddi's memories and the clues she cannot stop following.

Home, in these stories, is something people can rebuild.

Hoffman lives in Newport, Kentucky, with her husband and two cats, in a historic home she renovated herself. It suits a writer whose work keeps circling back to old houses, objects with stories, and the work of making a life feel whole. Her published fiction may be compact, but it offers two inviting places to begin.