Katrina Leno Books in Order

Katrina Leno was born on the East Coast and lives in Los Angeles. Her path there has included time in Connecticut, New York, and Scotland, a string of moves that helps explain why change, homesickness, and fresh starts often matter in her fiction.

She wanted to write from an early age. As a child, she wrote short stories and little plays, and she remembers realizing in a library that the names on book covers belonged to real people who had written them. She started a first novel at around twelve, an X-Files-inspired project she now regards with good humor.

College was not a straight line for Leno. She began at one school, transferred to Emerson College in Boston, then eventually completed an English degree at the University of Connecticut while living at home. Later, she spent a year in Edinburgh studying creative writing in a master's program with a focus on genre fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction.

Writing was never a casual side interest for her.

Before publishing fiction, Leno spent several years in New York working full time as a retail manager. After about three and a half years, she decided she needed to give writing a real chance. She left the job, moved back in with her parents for about nine months, wrote a manuscript, found an agent, sold her first two books, and was accepted into the program in Scotland.

It was a big reset, and it worked.

Her 2014 debut, The Half Life of Molly Pierce, follows a seventeen-year-old dealing with blackouts, missing memories, depression, and a past she cannot fully recall. The Lost & Found sends two anonymous online friends, both carrying old trauma and family questions, toward Austin on separate road trips. These early novels show Leno's interest in teenagers trying to name what hurts while figuring out who they can trust.

She later leaned further into the strange and magical. In Everything All at Once, a grieving teen receives a trail of letters from her late aunt. Summer of Salt brings inherited magic, romance, and a mystery to a small island. You Must Not Miss and Horrid take a darker turn, using unsettling supernatural elements to explore grief, anger, isolation, and the ways family history can linger in a house or a mind.

Leno also writes gentler stories with magic at the edges. Sometime in Summer centers on a bookstore, a seaside town, and a difficult season of change. Her middle grade novel The Umbrella Maker's Son follows a boy in a rain-soaked city as he investigates why his home never seems to dry out. Persephone's Curse moves to a New York City brownstone, where four sisters, an attic ghost, and old family stories connect to Greek myth.

Across age groups and settings, her characters tend to be young people caught between the ordinary world and something harder to explain. Leno still lives in Los Angeles, and she has said she has always loved the rain.