Julie Clark Books in Order

Julie Clark was born in 1971 and grew up in Santa Monica, California, close enough to the beach to spend long hours there with a book. While plenty of kids around her were surfing, she was usually the one reading on the sand, already pulled toward stories and the people inside them.

After high school she went to the University of the Pacific, where she studied design. She then spent a brief stretch working in the athletic department at UC Berkeley before returning home to Santa Monica to teach fifth grade. She has called teaching a labor of love. For years, writing had to live beside lesson plans, parenting, and the rest of ordinary adult life.

She took the long way around.

Clark has said she knew from childhood that she wanted to write, but the moment that pushed her to stop waiting came much later. In 2012, after her best friend died of breast cancer, she started thinking hard about the things people save for someday. She wrote a novel that did not sell, kept going, and built a routine around very early mornings, often getting up before dawn to write before heading to school.

In 2015, she was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. That experience sharpened her sense that time matters, and you can feel that pressure in her fiction. Her protagonists are rarely larger-than-life figures. They are mothers, daughters, workers, and women trying to hold steady while a life starts shifting under their feet.

Her first published novel, The Ones We Choose, arrived in 2018. It follows geneticist Paige Robson, whose young son starts asking hard questions about his biological father. Readers who start there usually notice what Clark cares about most, family, identity, motherhood, and the uneasy gap between what science can explain and what people still have to live through. Even before she was known for suspense, she was interested in how the past keeps leaning on the present.

The publishing story was not instantly tidy. The Ones We Choose was her debut, but it did not take off right away, and Clark has spoken about the fear that her follow-up might never make it into readers’ hands. That stretch says a lot about the kind of writer she is. She kept going, kept revising, and kept showing up to the page.

Everything changed with The Last Flight.

That 2020 novel, about two desperate women who swap plane tickets and identities, became her breakout book and introduced many readers to her sweet spot, fast-moving plots with real emotional weight underneath. She followed it with The Lies I Tell, a cat-and-mouse story about a con artist and the journalist who wants to expose her, and with the short story The Heart of a Mother, in which a DNA match threatens to blow open a carefully built life. In The Ghostwriter, an estranged daughter is asked to write her famous father’s last book, only to uncover a decades-old family crime. Across her books, California often matters, and so do reinvention, female friendship, motherhood, buried damage, and the stories people tell in order to survive.

Now she lives in Los Angeles with her family and two dogs. She has described a writing life built on discipline, coffee, and very early mornings, including stretches when she was up at 3:45 to write before teaching all day. It is a practical routine, and it suits the kind of books she writes. They move quickly, but they stay grounded in ordinary people making very hard choices.