Emily Giffin Books in Order

If you want her signature friendship‑and‑love story: Something Borrowed → Something Blue
If you’re curious about marriage and motherhood crossroads: Baby Proof → Heart of the Matter → First Comes Love
If you prefer timely, issue‑driven drama: All We Ever Wanted → The Lies That Bind
If you love big, sweeping romances: The One & Only → Meant to Be → The Summer Pact

Emily Giffin was born in Baltimore in 1972 and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois. In high school she joined the creative writing club and edited the student newspaper, early clues that stories would matter as much to her as grades or test scores.

At Naperville North High School she balanced those interests with a busy schedule, but writing kept pulling her back. She headed south to Wake Forest University, double‑majoring in history and English and spending her nights on papers and her days managing the men’s basketball team.

After college, Giffin followed a more conventional path. She enrolled at the University of Virginia School of Law, graduated in the late 1990s, and moved to Manhattan to work as a litigation associate at a large firm. The work was intense and prestigious, but it left little room for the kind of storytelling she loved.

In 2001 she finally gave herself permission to try.

Giffin left New York for London, trading billable hours for a tiny flat and a strict writing routine. Her first young‑adult novel, Lily Holding True, was rejected by eight publishers, a streak that might have ended many careers before they began. Instead, she started over with a new manuscript, originally called Rolling the Dice, which would become Something Borrowed.

When Something Borrowed was published, readers connected quickly with Rachel and Darcy’s complicated friendship and the uncomfortable choices at the heart of the story. The novel became a bestseller and was later adapted into a romantic‑comedy film, introducing Giffin’s work to an even wider audience.

She built on that momentum with a run of contemporary novels that stand alone but often speak to each other in theme and tone. Books like Something Blue, Baby Proof, Love the One You’re With, and Heart of the Matter explore friendship, marriage, and infidelity from the inside out, focusing on small decisions that quietly change the course of a life.

Later novels widened the lens. Where We Belong looks at adoption and identity through the reunion of a birth mother and the daughter she once placed. The One & Only drops readers into a Texas college town that lives for football. First Comes Love follows Atlanta sisters reshaped by grief, while All We Ever Wanted and The Lies That Bind take on social media scandals, privilege, and the fallout of 9/11. More recently, Meant to Be and The Summer Pact mix romance with questions about legacy, mental health, and how we recover from loss.

Across these books, Giffin returns to a few constants: female friendships that are as intense as any love story, characters who don’t always do the “right” thing, and moral gray areas that invite readers to ask what they would do in the same situation. Her prose is straightforward and conversational, which makes the emotional turns feel even sharper.

Today Giffin lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband and three children, plus a pair of much‑photographed dogs. She still talks openly about juggling writing with family life, book tours, and the pull of sports and pop culture. That blend of ordinary detail and high‑stakes emotion is exactly what keeps readers coming back to her novels year after year.