Emery Lord Books in Order

If you want a summer road-trip romance: Open Road Summer
If you want grief, friendship, and second chances: The Start of Me and You → The Map from Here to There
If you want a love story with mental health at the center: When We Collided
If you want faith, family questions, and camp drama: The Names They Gave Us
If you want grief with a mystery edge: All That's Left to Say

Emery Lord was born in Baltimore and moved around a lot as a kid, living in Virginia Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, and Columbus before middle school. She eventually settled in Cincinnati, and that sense of moving through different places shows up in her work. Her books often feel rooted in everyday American life, but they are especially tuned in to what it means to want stability, connection, and a place to belong.

Books were portable company.

She wrote from a young age, first in funny family newsletters and personal essays, then more seriously once she was out of college. In college she studied strategic communication and English, but fiction still felt a little far away, like something other people did. In her early twenties, she finally gave herself permission to try. She has said that she started writing fiction seriously after college, and that one early idea about an adult woman returning to her hometown kept pulling her backward into the character's teenage years instead.

That detour became a career.

Lord's debut, Open Road Summer, arrived first and helped establish what many readers now look for in her work: sharp banter, strong female friendship, romance with real emotional weight, and characters who are trying to heal while still making a mess of things. Reagan, Lilah, and a summer music tour gave the book a bright, high-energy setup, but underneath the fun there is grief, self-doubt, and the hard work of trusting people again.

Her later novels kept expanding that emotional range. The Start of Me and You and its follow-up The Map from Here to There stay close to Paige Hancock as she moves from grief and second chances into the anxiety of senior year and the pressure of growing up. When We Collided brings together summer romance, family strain, and bipolar disorder in Verona Cove, California, and it went on to win the Schneider Family Book Award. The Names They Gave Us takes on faith, illness, and family secrets through Lucy Hansson's summer at camp. All That's Left to Say adds a mystery thread, following Hannah MacLaren as she chases answers after her cousin's overdose.

Across all six books, Lord keeps returning to a few things. Teenage girls trying hard to look fine when they are not. Friendships that matter just as much as romance. Families that are messy, loving, frustrating, and impossible to ignore. Her settings tend to be ordinary on purpose, school hallways, beaches, tour buses, camps, suburbs, but the feelings inside those places are anything but small.

She has also talked openly about writing toward questions she does not fully know how to answer yet. That helps explain why the books feel personal without reading like direct autobiography. Readers often come for the crushes and the jokes, then stay for the honesty underneath. Even when Lord is writing about grief, mental illness, cancer, or class tension, she leaves room for warmth, humor, and the possibility that people can change.

These days, she lives in Cincinnati with her family in an old house with bookshelves in almost every room. Her books have been translated into many languages, and All That's Left to Say became an instant USA Today bestseller. Still, the heart of her work feels close to where she started: stories about teenagers trying to figure out who they are, who they can trust, and how to keep going.