Emma Straub Books in Order

Twelve stories follow people negotiating awkward desires, grief, and changes in familiar relationships. An academic falls for a student, sisters reconsider their assumptions, and widows seek connection while the past complicates their attempts to move forward.

Elsa Emerson leaves Wisconsin for Los Angeles and is transformed by a Hollywood mogul into screen star Laura Lamont. As her career grows, she struggles to reconcile fame, family, personal happiness, and the identity she left behind.

Franny plans a two-week family holiday in a Majorcan villa, hoping for relaxation far from Manhattan. The trip instead brings marriage troubles, strained friendships, and concealed tensions into close quarters as everyone carries their own emotional baggage.

Former college bandmates Elizabeth, Andrew, and Zoe have built neighboring lives in Brooklyn. As their children begin romantic relationships, old secrets about their musical past and a famous former band member unsettle their marriages and friendships.

After witnessing a school bus accident, Astrid Strick questions how she raised her three adult children. As they confront their own problems with parenthood and maturity, the family must reckon with past mistakes and difficult truths.

Approaching forty and worried about her ailing father, Alice wakes up in 1996 as her sixteen-year-old self. Reunited with her younger, healthier dad, she considers what she might change with another chance at the past.

This picture book invites children to imagine everyday objects as hats for people, toys, and even fingers. Acorns, raspberries, and empty pudding cups become starting points for playful observation, invention, and seeing familiar things differently.

Annie reluctantly joins a cruise celebrating the boy band she adored as a teenager. Surrounded by nostalgic fans, she reconnects with forgotten desires and finds unexpected companionship with a performer whose celebrity conceals a need for friendship.