Cynthia Hand Books in Order

Cynthia Hand grew up in southeast Idaho, just outside Idaho Falls, and she started writing almost as soon as she could hold a pencil. Her first story, written when she was about six, was about a fairy being born in a tulip. A second grade teacher told her she would be an author one day, and Hand believed her.

She kept writing anyway.

In middle school and high school, she and her friends ran a fan fiction circle built around the books and movies they loved. Hand often ended up as the editor, collecting pages, typing them up, and attacking them with a red pen. Long before publication, she was already doing the two things that would shape her career, telling stories and thinking hard about how stories work.

For college, she went to the College of Idaho, where she studied English with a pre-law emphasis. Law looked practical. Writing felt riskier. By her senior year, though, she knew she did not want to spend her life in the law section of a library. She applied to graduate programs instead, earned an MFA in fiction writing from Boise State University, and later a PhD in fiction writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. During those years she published short fiction, found her agent, and learned that teaching mattered to her almost as much as writing.

Then life slowed the writing down.

Hand was teaching, raising a family, and working on literary fiction when the idea for Unearthly arrived. That book, about Clara Gardner, a teenage girl who learns she is part angel, became her first published novel in 2011 and opened the door to Hallowed, Radiant, and Boundless. What readers often like about those books is that the supernatural setup never overwhelms the feelings. Clara's visions, choices, family ties, and messy love life matter just as much as the angel lore.

She has never stayed in one lane for long. The Last Time We Say Goodbye turns from fantasy to contemporary grief, following a girl reeling after her brother's suicide. Hand has said the book was deeply personal, and that comes through in how steady and unsentimental it feels. The Afterlife of Holly Chase goes in a very different direction, turning A Christmas Carol into a sharp, funny, sad story about regret and second chances.

Her contemporary novels often pull from questions close to home. Hand is adopted, and The How and the Why follows an adopted teen searching for her birth mother while reading letters written years earlier by the young woman who gave her up. In 2020, after writing the novel, Hand connected with her own birth mother, who turned out to live nearby. With You All the Way is another shift again, a frank coming-of-age story about sex, family secrets, and sister dynamics during a trip to Hawaii.

Collaboration has become a big part of her career too. With Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows, she helped create the Lady Janies books, starting with My Lady Jane. Those novels remix history and classic literature with magic, jokes, and a strong desire to give girls better endings than the old versions allowed. The group later kept going with the Mary books, including My Contrary Mary, My Imaginary Mary, and My Salty Mary.

These days Hand lives in Boise, Idaho and teaches creative writing at Boise State. She has also taught at Pepperdine University, and she still talks about teaching with real affection. Off the page, the details are pleasantly specific: a husband who loves typewriters, kids, cats, a dog, and plenty of books around the house. It fits the work. Her stories may have angels, ghosts, queens, or pirates in them, but they tend to stay close to ordinary human questions about love, identity, grief, and figuring out what to do next.