Kate Jacobs Books in Order

If you want the full knitting-club story: The Friday Night Knitting Club → Knit Two → Knit the Season.
If you want a standalone first: Comfort Food.
If you like holiday novels with backstory: The Friday Night Knitting Club → Knit Two → Knit the Season.

Kate Jacobs grew up in Hope, British Columbia, near Vancouver, in a place full of family and long memory. By her own telling, it could also feel very small when she was a teenager, which helps explain why she pushed to leave for boarding school in Victoria before heading to Carleton University in Ottawa to study journalism.

Then came New York.

She moved there with a degree, plenty of nerve, and a plan to break into magazine publishing. She earned a master's degree at NYU, worked a string of unpaid internships, and eventually landed a job as assistant to the Books & Fiction editor at Redbook. She has described those early years as a mix of answering phones, reading piles of unsolicited manuscripts, and learning, firsthand, what it means when stories reach the right readers.

From there she kept working in women's media, with editorial roles at Working Woman and Family Life, and later writing and editing for Lifetime Television's website. Those jobs kept her close to stories about work, friendship, ambition, marriage, parenthood, and the everyday scrapes of adult life. You can feel that background in her fiction.

She writes about women who are busy, worried, funny, imperfect, and trying to keep moving.

Her best-known book is The Friday Night Knitting Club, set around a Manhattan yarn shop run by Georgia Walker and loved by an ever-growing circle of women. It became a #1 New York Times bestseller and put Jacobs on the map for readers who like ensemble stories with real emotional pull. The novel's hook is knitting, but the deeper appeal is the community around the table, the way friends become family, and the way small kindnesses end up carrying real weight.

Jacobs stayed with that world in Knit Two and Knit the Season, letting the friendships deepen and the younger characters grow up. Dakota, Georgia's daughter, becomes more central as the series goes on, and the books widen to include romance, grief, family memory, and the practical work of keeping a shared place alive. Readers who click with these novels usually are not looking for high-concept plotting. They come for the conversations, the humor, the setbacks, and the sense that ordinary care can be dramatic enough.

With Comfort Food, she shifted from yarn to kitchens and television studios. The novel follows Augusta, known as Gus, Simpson, a cooking-show star facing change at work and at home, and it proves that Jacobs's real subject was never just knitting. Again and again, she writes about women building lives, losing their footing, and figuring out how to begin again without pretending the mess never happened.

Her books keep circling similar themes, mothers and daughters, surrogate families, second chances, career reinvention, and the comforts people make with their hands, whether that means knitting a sweater or cooking dinner. New York shows up often, especially the version of the city where work and personal life spill into each other. Even when the plots get emotional, the details stay grounded in jobs, rent, habits, meals, and friendship.

After about a decade in Manhattan, Jacobs moved to Southern California, and current author bios place her in Los Angeles with her husband, Jon, and their dog, Baxter. She has said that she once imagined herself writing in a neat home office, then found herself back at the dining room table, working late into the night instead. She also knits to relax, likes quick projects, and has admitted that a good nap can be just as useful as a burst of discipline. That feels about right for a writer who has always preferred real life to shiny myths.