JF Riordan Books in Order

J.F. Riordan was born in New Jersey, but she grew up mostly in the Midwest after her family moved first to Michigan and then to Wisconsin. That geography matters to her books, which are rooted in Great Lakes weather, small-town habits, and the tug of places that stay with you.

As a young teenager, Riordan decided she wanted to sing opera. At 16 she left high school to study voice at the University of New Mexico, and she went on to become a professional singer. The dream was real, but so were the travel, backstage friction, and homesickness that came with that life.

That experience changed her sense of what a good life looks like. She returned to the Midwest, earned a degree in English, taught in a Milwaukee inner-city high school for three years, and coached a forensics team. Later she worked in philanthropy, which meant writing had to be fit around the edges of the day.

She did not move straight into novels. At first she was drawn to essays and thought about nonfiction, but fiction kept pulling at her. Slowly a story formed around Fiona Campbell, a former Chicago reporter, and around the island setting that had fixed itself in Riordan's imagination.

Then Washington Island really took over.

Riordan first visited the island while looking for something to do in Door County, and the trip stayed with her. She has said the ferry ride worked its own kind of magic. That feeling became the seed of the North of the Tension Line novels, where love, weather, local politics, grudges, humor, and spiritual searching all share the page.

The series begins with North of the Tension Line, in which Fiona takes a dare and tries to survive a winter on Washington Island. It continues through The Audacity of Goats, Robert's Rules, A Small Earnest Question, and Throwing Bears for George. Readers often come for the setting, then stay for the ensemble, the neighbor feuds, the goats, the gossip, and the steady attention Riordan gives to ordinary life. The first novel won an IPPY gold medal for Great Lakes regional fiction, and A Small Earnest Question was a Foreword INDIES finalist.

Riordan also writes nonfiction. In Reflections on a Life in Exile, she turns to short essays about grief, faith, family, dogs, weather, and the strange revelations that can arrive in a hardware store or a passing conversation. The essays feel of a piece with the novels, close looking, dryly funny, and alert to the emotional weight of everyday life.

The beauty of the ordinary is the clearest thread running through all her work.

Small towns sit at the center of that work, along with belonging, loneliness, friendship, and the uneasy balance between privacy and community. Riordan still lives in Wisconsin with her husband and dogs, and she has described herself as living in exile from Washington Island because she would rather be there full time. That longing gives her fiction and essays some of their warmth and ache.