Jacqueline Sheehan Books in Order

If you want the book most readers start with: Lost & Found → Picture This
If you want dog-centered emotional fiction: A Dog Like Lloyd
If you like family secrets and mother-daughter drama: The Center of the World → The Tiger in the House
If you want time-slip fiction with an Irish setting: Now & Then
If you want historical fiction rooted in a real life: Truth

Jacqueline Sheehan is a novelist, essayist, and psychologist who has long described herself as a New Englander through and through. For about twenty years she lived in Oregon, California, and New Mexico, taking on all kinds of work, from house painting and freelance photography to newspaper writing and even directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

That wide-ranging life shows up in her fiction. Before her novels found a big readership, she was already publishing essays, travel pieces, short stories, and radio commentaries. In 2005 she also edited Women Writing in Prison, an anthology that grew out of years of workshops with incarcerated women.

She came to fiction with a psychologist's habit of asking why people do what they do.

That background matters. Sheehan's books are full of people carrying grief, guilt, secrecy, or divided loyalties, but they never read like clinical case studies. They read like lives in motion, which is part of why readers respond so strongly to the family tension, emotional aftershocks, and small moments of relief in her work. She also teaches that connection between psychology and storytelling in her workshops on character.

Her best known novel is Lost & Found, the story of grieving psychologist Rocky Pelligrino, a Maine island, and a black Labrador who arrives at exactly the right time. Readers tend to remember the dog, but they also remember how honestly Sheehan writes about recovery, loneliness, friendship, and second chances. Picture This returns to Rocky's world and asks what healing looks like after the first shock has passed.

Dogs matter in Jacqueline Sheehan's fiction because they clearly matter in Jacqueline Sheehan's life.

She has said that animals did not appear in her novels until Lost & Found, but once they did, they stayed. You can feel that same warmth in The Tiger in the House, a darker story about a child found alone by the roadside, and in the way animals often anchor her books when the human characters are lost, defensive, or simply not ready to trust one another.

Sheehan does not stay in one lane. Now & Then moves into time-slip fiction, sending a struggling woman and her teenage nephew into nineteenth-century Ireland. The Center of the World turns toward adoption, war, and identity as a mother and daughter reckon with a long-buried truth linked to Guatemala. Even when the premises change, the emotional questions stay familiar: who tells the truth, who keeps the secret, and what a person owes to family.

She also reached back into history with her Sojourner Truth fiction, including Truth and The Comet's Tale. Those books show another side of her work, deep research, moral seriousness, and a strong interest in women whose public strength hides a very private inner life. Alongside the novels, she has written for NPR and contributed to Modern Love. Her work has also taken her to writing residencies in the United States and abroad.

Sheehan has taught workshops at Grub Street in Boston and Writers in Progress in Florence, Massachusetts, and she has also led writing workshops abroad. She lives in Florence, Massachusetts, where she continues to teach and write. The through line in all of it is pretty clear: she is drawn to damaged people, unexpected companions, and the slow work of finding a way forward.