Gabrielle Zevin Books in Order

Gabrielle Zevin was born in New York City in 1977 and grew up in Boca Raton, Florida. Her mother immigrated to the United States from Korea as a child, and her father has Jewish roots in Eastern Europe. Both parents worked for IBM, and their home was full of books, library trips, and computers.

As an only child, Zevin spent a lot of time reading and making things up. She has spoken about feeling like an outsider in the places she lived, an experience that later fed her interest in identity, belonging, and the private stories people carry.

Writing came early. After learning to touch-type around age eight, she wrote plays, stories, journals, and letters. As a teenager, an angry letter about a music review helped land her a job as a local newspaper's music critic.

At Harvard, Zevin studied English and American literature. She did not take creative-writing classes, preferring to learn by reading and doing the work. She also met director Hans Canosa there, and after college she wrote for film, including Conversations with Other Women, which earned an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best First Screenplay.

Her first published novels arrived in 2005: the adult fable Margarettown and the young adult novel Elsewhere. Elsewhere follows a teenager navigating an afterlife where people grow younger, and it showed Zevin's interest in putting big questions inside close, personal stories. She followed with Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, a high-school story about memory, friendship, and choosing who to become.

She has always crossed categories. The Birthright books put Anya Balanchine in a future New York where chocolate is illegal, while The Hole We're In looks at a Texas family buckling under debt and old wounds. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry centers on a bookstore owner given an unexpected chance to remake his life, and Young Jane Young traces the fallout of a political sex scandal through several women's perspectives.

Then came Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, about the decades-long creative partnership between video-game designers Sam Masur and Sadie Green. Zevin grew up playing games, and her father's home computer introduced her to early titles such as Alley Cat and Oregon Trail. The novel uses game design to think through friendship, ambition, disability, work, and loss without treating any of those subjects as simple.

Her books return often to people who must rebuild after a rupture. She writes about families, old friends, young people with more responsibility than they should have, and adults trying to tell a more honest version of their own past. There is usually humor in the hard parts.

Zevin lives in Los Angeles. Her work has been translated into more than forty languages, and she continues to write across adult and young adult fiction, with a screenwriter's feel for dialogue and scene.