Irina Reyn Books in Order

Irina Reyn was born in Moscow and came to the United States with her parents when she was seven. Her family first lived in Brooklyn, then Queens, before moving to Fair Lawn, New Jersey, when she was a teenager. Those moves gave her an early education in how place, language, and family expectations can shape a person.

Her fiction often stays close to that unsettled space between old homes and new ones. She writes about immigrants, parents and children, marriages under strain, and people trying to decide what they owe the lives they have built.

Place matters in her books.

Before her novels, Reyn worked in both fiction and nonfiction. In 2007, she edited Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State, an anthology that gathers personal, funny, and sharp-eyed essays about a state that is often reduced to punch lines. The collection ranges across suburbs, shore towns, cities, family memories, highways, and the strange pull of going home again.

Her first novel, What Happened to Anna K., arrived in 2008. It reworks the emotional framework of Anna Karenina in the Russian-Jewish immigrant community of Queens. Anna is married to Alex, an older businessman, but her restlessness grows after she meets an aspiring writer connected to her cousin. The novel follows desire, loyalty, class, and the cost of wanting a different life. It was named among the best books of 2008 by several outlets and received the Goldberg Prize for Fiction.

In The Imperial Wife, Reyn moves between present-day New York and eighteenth-century Russia. Tanya Kagan is a Russian-art specialist handling a high-stakes auction while trying to understand why her husband has suddenly left. Her story runs alongside that of the young woman who will become Catherine the Great, with a precious historical artifact linking the two worlds. The book asks practical, uncomfortable questions about marriage, independence, money, and ambition.

The past has a way of showing up at the dinner table.

Her 2019 novel Mother Country centers on Nadia, an immigrant mother in Brooklyn who has been separated from her daughter in Ukraine for years. Nadia works demanding care jobs, faces tension within her own community, and watches the war back home from a distance that does not make it feel less immediate. When her daughter's health is at risk, the separation can no longer be treated as something to endure quietly.

Across these books, Reyn is interested in women making hard choices with limited room to move. Her characters can be funny, stubborn, private, and deeply conflicted. Their problems are personal, but they are also shaped by borders, family history, money, and the stories people tell about what a good life should look like.

Reyn's shorter work has appeared in literary magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. She has also received writing fellowships and residencies. She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she teaches fiction writing, and has described dividing her time between Pittsburgh and Brooklyn.