Kathleen Glasgow Books in Order

If you want her darkest contemporary standalone: Girl in Pieces → How to Make Friends with the Dark → You'd Be Home Now.
If you want to follow her newer standalones in order: You'd Be Home Now → Permanent Vacancy → The Glass Girl.
If you love co written teen mysteries: The Agathas → The Night in Question.
If you just want one book to sample her style: Girl in Pieces.

Kathleen Glasgow writes the kind of young adult novels that get passed from friend to friend with dog eared pages and underlined lines. Her stories are about teenagers at the edge of themselves, trying to figure out how to stay.

Glasgow was born in 1969 and eventually made her home in Tucson, Arizona, but her path to novels ran through years of poetry and teaching. She studied at the University of Minnesota, then spent more than a decade coordinating its graduate creative writing program while writing poems on the side.

For a long time she thought of herself primarily as a poet. The shift toward fiction began when she realised that the stories she wanted to tell about pain, survival, and messy hope needed more space than a poem could comfortably hold.

In 2016 she published Girl in Pieces, the book that would change her life and introduce readers to Charlie Davis, a seventeen year old girl recovering from self harm and homelessness. The novel landed on the New York Times bestseller list and quietly made its way into classrooms, libraries, and support groups for teens who saw pieces of their own lives in Charlie's scars.

Her next novel, How to Make Friends with the Dark, follows Tiger Tolliver after the sudden death of her mother, tracing the strange, exhausting work of grief as Tiger moves through foster care and toward some kind of self. Glasgow has spoken openly about writing that book while carrying her own losses, which gives the story a raw, lived in feeling.

You'd Be Home Now turns its focus to a small town struggling with the opioid crisis. Narrated by Emory Ward, a girl who has always been cast as the good one in a wealthy family, the book tracks what happens when her beloved older brother comes home from rehab and nothing about their town, or their family, is as simple as the gossip suggests.

Alongside these intense contemporary standalones, Glasgow teamed up with fellow author Liz Lawson for The Agathas and its sequel The Night in Question. Set in the coastal town of Castle Cove, those books follow unlikely friends Alice Ogilvie and Iris Adams as they use lessons borrowed from Agatha Christie to solve murders and long buried town secrets. The mysteries are twisty, but the heart of the series lives in friendship, class divides, and what it costs to tell the truth.

With The Glass Girl, Glasgow returned to solo work and to another teenager in crisis, this time a fifteen year old named Bella whose drinking has spiralled into addiction. The novel spends as much time in rehab and recovery as it does in the chaos that leads up to it, underlining a pattern that runs through all of Glasgow's books, things can be unbearably hard, and still there are people and places that make healing possible.

Glasgow still lives in Tucson, writing in the mornings and talking with readers in schools, libraries, and online. She is open about her own history with mental health and self harm, which often finds its way into her work in careful, boundary aware ways.

For many teens, her novels are the first time they see their darkest thoughts written down without judgment. She gives them complicated girls, bad decisions, stubborn hope, and the reminder that being broken is not the same as being beyond repair.