Jennifer Egan Books in Order

If you want her most celebrated novels: A Visit from the Goon Squad → The Candy House
If you love historical fiction and the waterfront: Manhattan Beach
If you like eerie, genre-bending suspense: The Keep → Look at Me
If you prefer more straightforward coming-of-age stories: The Invisible Circus
If you want to sample her short fiction: Emerald City → Why China?

Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer whose work moves between historical fiction, speculative technology, and psychological suspense. Born in Chicago in 1962 and raised in San Francisco, she has built a career that bridges fiction and long-form journalism.

She grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from Lowell High School before heading east to the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied English literature. After college she received a Thouron Award that allowed her to spend two years at St John's College, Cambridge, deepening her reading and beginning to take her own writing seriously.

After graduate school she moved to New York in 1987 and worked a string of day jobs, from catering at the World Trade Center to temping in offices, while teaching herself to write fiction at night.

Early in her career Egan published the story collection Emerald City and the novel The Invisible Circus, about a young woman retracing her idealistic sister's final travels across Europe. The Invisible Circus was later adapted into a feature film, introducing her work to a wider audience.

With Look at Me, which follows a fashion model whose reconstructed face leaves her unrecognizable, she turned her attention to image culture, celebrity, and the early Internet era. The novel was a finalist for the National Book Award and showed how interested she was in questions of identity, performance, and the stories people tell about themselves.

The Keep pushed her experimentation further, braiding a decaying European castle, two estranged cousins, and a prison writing class into one unsettling narrative. Switching between voices and frames, it plays with gothic atmosphere while staying rooted in the uneasy inner lives of its characters.

A Visit from the Goon Squad, published in 2010, became her best-known book. Built from linked chapters that jump across decades, places, and formats, it circles the music world and a web of people connected to record executive Bennie Salazar and his former assistant Sasha, tracing how time, chance, and regret shape their lives.

Her books rarely repeat themselves, but they share a fascination with how time alters people and how technology, memory, and storytelling overlap.

Later novels have kept that curiosity while moving into new territory. Manhattan Beach is a World War II story set on the Brooklyn waterfront, following Anna Kerrigan as she works at the Navy Yard, trains as a diver, and tries to understand the disappearance of her father. The Candy House, a companion to A Visit from the Goon Squad, imagines a tech platform that lets users upload and share their memories, using that device to explore privacy, authenticity, and what it means to know another person.

Alongside her fiction, Egan has written extensively for magazines, especially The New York Times Magazine, on subjects ranging from homeless children to families living with mental illness. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the New York Public Library, and from 2018 to 2020 she served as president of PEN America.

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, theater director David Herskovits, and their two sons. She still drafts by hand, chasing the intuitive leaps and surprising connections that give her novels their mix of formal playfulness and emotional clarity.