Kate Christensen Books in Order

If you want the award winner first: The Great Man → The Astral
If you like darkly funny New York novels: In the Drink → Jeremy Thrane → The Epicure's Lament
If you want memoir and food writing: Blue Plate Special → How to Cook a Moose
If you want the later novels: The Last Cruise → Welcome Home, Stranger → Good Company

Kate Christensen was born in Berkeley, California, in 1962, and spent much of her childhood in Arizona after her family moved there when she was young. That mix of California and Southwest roots stayed with her, but so did a restless feeling that shows up all through her books, where people are often looking for home, steadier love, or just a place where they can breathe.

Food and storytelling got tangled together early for her. In Blue Plate Special, she writes about a childhood shaped by instability and violence as well as books, music, and big appetites, and that mix helps explain why meals, kitchens, bodies, and family tensions feel so alive in both her fiction and nonfiction.

She started writing young, and even one of her first childhood stories involved sisters traveling the world and stopping to eat.

As a teenager she moved around a lot, then went to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where she studied English. After that came the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and then New York City in 1989. She worked in publishing there, and those years in Manhattan and Brooklyn became the raw material for her first run of novels.

Her debut, In the Drink, dropped readers into the life of a broke twenty-nine-year-old secretary trying to stay afloat in the city. Jeremy Thrane followed with another New York story, this time about a man abruptly pushed out of his comfortable arrangement and forced to grow up fast. Then The Epicure's Lament introduced Hugo Whittier, a difficult narrator whose bad habits, wit, and self-sabotage made him hard to forget.

A few years later, The Great Man won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and brought her a wider readership.

What readers tend to like about Christensen is that she doesn't sand her people smooth. Her characters can be vain, funny, selfish, generous, sexual, hungry, and wrong, sometimes all on the same page. In books like Trouble, The Astral, and Welcome Home, Stranger, she keeps returning to middle age, damaged families, old desire, friendship under stress, and the awkward gap between the life people wanted and the life they actually built.

Place matters in her work, too. New York gave her the cramped apartments, bars, jobs, and overheated social worlds of the early novels. Maine later became just as important, especially in How to Cook a Moose and Welcome Home, Stranger, where weather, food, class, and local habits all shape the emotional weather of a scene. Even The Last Cruise, set aboard a fading luxury liner on its last voyage, feels grounded in place, because she is so interested in what happens when private need collides with a particular, pressure-cooker world.

Her nonfiction makes the same interests even clearer. Blue Plate Special traces her life through appetite, from California and Arizona girlhood to adulthood as a writer, and How to Cook a Moose follows her move to Maine and her growing attachment to food, community, and making a life from scratch. Alongside the books, she has written essays, reviews, and food pieces for a wide range of publications.

Christensen has not stayed in one lane. She has written sharp social novels, memoirs, a historical fantasy for younger readers, The Sacred & the Divine, written with Melissa Henderson, and the 2026 novel Good Company. She now lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, Brendan Fitzgerald, and their dogs. The setting is different, but the interest in appetite, place, and messy human connection is still there.