Christina Baker Kline Books in Order

If you want her most popular novel: Orphan Train → Orphan Train Girl
If you love art and historical settings: A Piece of the World → The Exiles
If you prefer contemporary family drama: Sweet Water → Desire Lines → Bird in Hand → The Way Life Should Be
If you are curious about her thrillers: Please Don't Lie → Watch Her Lie
If you want short companion reads: Vivian's Choice → The Scenic Route

Christina Baker Kline is a novelist who works where overlooked history meets the messiness of everyday family life.

She is best known for Orphan Train, A Piece of the World, and The Exiles, novels that braid real events with intimate, character driven stories. Her books often begin with a single image, a painting, a photograph, a news clipping, then follow the people who might have stood just outside the frame. Readers come to her work for emotional honesty, a strong sense of place, and the feeling that the past is never entirely past.

Kline was born in Cambridge, England, in 1964 and grew up between there, the American South, and Maine. Moving among different regions and school systems gave her an early awareness of how families carry their own histories into new landscapes. The rocky coast of Maine and the small towns she knew as a child would later become fixtures in her fiction.

She studied English at Yale, went on to earn a masters degree at Cambridge, and completed an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in creative writing. Before publishing widely, she spent years teaching fiction, nonfiction, literature, and women’s studies at Yale, NYU, UVA, Drew, and Fordham, eventually serving as writer in residence at Fordham. That classroom work sharpened her instinct for structure and gave her a close up view of how people learn to shape their own stories.

Alongside teaching, Kline edited and co wrote several nonfiction books that circle the lives of women and families. Collections such as The Conversation Begins, Child of Mine, Room to Grow, About Face, and Always Too Soon gather essays on feminism, early motherhood, raising young children, and grieving the loss of parents. Those projects deepened her interest in everyday resilience, a thread that runs straight into her later novels.

Place matters to her.

Her early fiction, including Sweet Water, Desire Lines, The Way Life Should Be, and Bird in Hand, is rooted in contemporary settings and domestic turning points, an inheritance in rural Tennessee, a friend’s disappearance in Maine, a risky move to coastal New England, a car accident that shatters two marriages. With Orphan Train she turned directly to historical material, linking a present day foster teen in Maine with a ninety one year old woman who once rode a real orphan train from New York to the Midwest. The novel spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, reached the top spot, and was published in more than forty countries. Kline later adapted the story for younger readers in Orphan Train Girl and wrote Vivian's Choice, an added scene that lets readers see a pivotal decision from the older woman’s point of view.

A Piece of the World and The Exiles extended that historical lens. In the first, she imagines the inner life of Christina Olson, muse for Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina's World, tracing a woman’s constrained but fiercely observed life on a Maine farm. In the second, she follows English convicts and an Aboriginal girl in nineteenth century Australia, exploring exile, survival, and colonial violence. These novels, along with her earlier work, have received honors including the New England Prize for Fiction, the Maine Literary Award, an international literary prize in Paris, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and they continue to be chosen as common reads by schools and communities.

Recently Kline has stepped into psychological suspense with coauthor Anne Burt in their Crystal River thrillers, beginning with Please Don't Lie, about a woman who seeks a fresh start in an isolated Adirondack town and instead finds herself surrounded by secrets and shifting loyalties. She is also at work on The Foursome, a historical novel about two North Carolina sisters who marry the conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker, a story drawn from her own distant family connections. Away from the desk she serves on boards that support writers and literacy, offers scholarships and mentoring for emerging authors, and continues to teach and speak about craft. She divides her time between New York City and Southwest Harbor, Maine, with her husband and three sons, and her work keeps circling the same questions, how the past shapes identity, what we owe the people we love, and how ordinary lives absorb extraordinary shocks.