Gretchen Anthony Books in Order

If you want to read in publication order: Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners → The Kids Are Gonna Ask → The Book Haters' Book Club → Tired Ladies Take a Stand
If you want holiday family drama: Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners
If you like coming-of-age stories with a mystery: The Kids Are Gonna Ask
If you want a bookish community story: The Book Haters' Book Club
If you want midlife friendship and reinvention: Tired Ladies Take a Stand

Gretchen Anthony is a Minneapolis novelist, speaker, and humorist whose fiction lives at the crossroads of family mess, community life, and hard-earned second chances. Her books are funny in a real-life way, the kind of funny that sits right next to grief, frustration, and love. She tends to write about ordinary people who are trying to hold things together, then have to figure out what happens when the plan falls apart.

For a long time, she was helping other people tell their stories instead of putting her own name on the cover.

Anthony studied speech at St. Olaf College, went on to graduate work in communications, and built a long career in corporate communications. Her last corporate job was as director of corporate communications for Famous Dave's. She also spent years as a ghostwriter, writing for everyone from CEOs and doctors to startup founders and barbecue experts. That background shows up in her fiction. She has a sharp ear for how people talk, what they avoid saying, and how much family history can hide inside a perfectly normal conversation.

The big turn came after she was laid off in her 40s. Instead of treating that moment like an ending, she used it to chase the writing goal she had carried for years. She has said that it was time to meet those longtime ambitions, and fiction was where she had always meant to land. Her debut novel, Evergreen Tidings from the Baumgartners, arrived in 2018 and made it clear what kind of stories she wanted to tell.

That first book centers on a tightly wound Minnesota matriarch whose need for order collides with the lives of the people she loves. It is a family story, but also a story about image, pride, church life, and the gap between the version of ourselves we present and the version our relatives know by heart. Anthony returned to that mix of warmth and complication in The Kids Are Gonna Ask, where teenage twins start a podcast to find the biological father they never knew. The novel won a 2021 Alex Award, and it shows how comfortable she is writing about families under pressure in a very modern spotlight.

She likes big feelings, but she also likes a clever premise.

In The Book Haters' Book Club, the fight to save an independent bookstore becomes a story about grief, loyalty, and the strange ways people protect what matters most. In Tired Ladies Take a Stand, four longtime friends reach the point where saying yes to everything no longer feels brave, it just feels exhausting. Across both novels, Anthony keeps coming back to women who are carrying too much, friendships that need maintenance, and communities that can be both comforting and nosy.

Place matters in her work, too. Minnesota and the Twin Cities show up again and again, not just as backdrops but as lived-in worlds full of church basements, neighborhood institutions, dinner tables, and local politics. Her characters are often book people, busy mothers, adult children, or partners in the middle of rethinking their lives. Even when the setup is high concept, the emotional engine is usually familiar: who gets heard, who gets left out, and what it takes to tell the truth inside a family.

These days she lives in Minneapolis with her family and continues to write, speak, and stay close to the reading community. She also hosts The Middle Book Club, which focuses on books about women in the middle years of life. That feels like a neat summary of Anthony's lane as a novelist, too. She writes with affection for people who are no longer brand new, who have a lot on their plates, and who still have every right to be the main character.