Elinor Lipman Books in Order

Lipman's first book is a linked story collection about awkward, hopeful people fumbling toward connection. The standout romance begins in line at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, which tells you a lot about the book's offbeat charm.

April Epner has never wanted to meet her birth mother, so Bernice Graverman's sudden entrance is a shock. Their uneasy reunion, mixed with romantic upheaval, makes for a sharp, funny story about family and identity.

At thirty, Melinda LeBlanc returns to her Massachusetts hometown, bruised by disappointment and working in the wedding trade she never imagined. Old classmates, new entanglements, and unfinished ambitions force her to rethink what coming home really means.

Harriet Mahoney, unlucky in love and short on confidence, answers an ad to ghostwrite the life story of glamorous Isabel Krug. Living in Isabel's orbit changes her voice, her loyalties, and the shape of her future.

After a Vermont inn makes clear that Jewish guests are unwelcome, Natalie Marx refuses to let the insult go. Her long-running fixation with the place shapes her choices, her loves, and a very satisfying reckoning.

Decades after jilting Adele Dobbin, charming rascal Harvey Nash drifts back into her life and into the lives of her sisters. His return shakes loose old grudges, old habits, and the possibility of belated happiness.

When Sunny returns home after her mother is found dead with a man she barely knew, she walks into a town full of gossip and half-hidden family history. The funeral brings her close to another grieving stranger, and old secrets start to stir.

Brilliant young doctor Alice Thrift can master medicine but not people. When a fast-talking suitor crashes into her carefully controlled life, she has to decide whether romance is a cure, a scam, or both.

Sixteen-year-old Frederica Hatch has grown up in a college dorm under the watch of her earnest professor parents. When a glamorous new dorm mother arrives with a secret link to her father, campus life gets funnier, stranger, and much more complicated.

Manhattan lawyer Henry Archer reconnects with the stepdaughter he has not seen in twenty-five years, and his orderly life is thrown wide open. As she moves into his townhouse and chaos follows, the story becomes a warm, offbeat comedy about found family.

This slim collection gathers Lipman's rhyming political tweets from the 2012 election season. Quick, sharp, and playful, it turns campaign chaos into bite-size comic verse you can read in a sitting.

In these personal essays, Lipman writes about childhood, marriage, widowhood, politics, aging parents, and the strange world of modern dating. The pieces are funny, candid, and quietly moving without losing their light touch.

Widowed Gwen-Laura moves in with her sister Margot in a Greenwich Village penthouse, where money trouble, a young boarder, and an ex-husband fresh out of prison keep life buzzing. It is a funny, tender story about grief, reinvention, and family.

Faith Frankel buys a shabby bargain house with a suspicious past while her fiance drifts farther away. As family trouble, attic clues, and a promising new friendship pile up, she starts rebuilding her life on her own terms.

Recently divorced Daphne Maritch tosses out the annotated yearbook her late mother treasured, only to spark a chain of gossip, amateur sleuthing, and romantic complications. A small act of decluttering turns into a very public mess.

Fired from her White House records job after a reckless email, Rachel Klein is promptly pulled into an even messier political scandal. Recovering at home, she juggles anxious parents, a new job, and the chance to upset powerful people.

After a nosy neighbor reports lawyer Jane Morgan for rooftop sex, she lands on house arrest and loses her footing. Stuck at home, she befriends another ankle-monitored resident and discovers that scandal might open the door to love.

Emma Lewis reluctantly takes over her parents' estate-sale business in small-town Massachusetts and lands a job at a grand former bordello. Between shady clients, local gossip, and an unexpected romance, work gets much more interesting.