Laura Van Den Berg Books in Order

Laura van den Berg grew up in Orlando, Florida, and that landscape still glows through her fiction. Tourist surfaces, summer storms, roadside strangeness, and the feeling that ordinary life could tip into something eerie at any moment are all part of her world. Even when her books travel far from home, they tend to carry that charged, off-kilter atmosphere with them.

She has said she did not live anywhere else until she was 22, and that long stretch matters. Havana, Kansas, Madagascar, and post-apocalyptic highways all show up in her work, but Florida keeps returning as both place and pressure system. In her fiction, it is never just a backdrop. It is weather, memory, performance, danger, and sometimes a ghost.

Florida gave her the weather, and it gave her the weirdness.

Van den Berg has described her childhood home as having an almost zoo-like quality, which feels oddly fitting for a writer so alert to the border between the familiar and the wild. She began building her writing life in earnest when she entered the MFA program at Emerson College in 2005. There, she found the sense of purpose and community that helped make a writing life feel real, and her first book, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, grew out of that period.

That debut collection introduced many of the things readers still come to her for: women in motion, emotional loneliness, travel that feels both thrilling and destabilizing, and settings where myth and daily life brush against each other. Her second collection, The Isle of Youth, pushed those qualities further, with stories shaped by secrecy, deception, reinvention, and a strong noir undertow.

Her novels widen the frame without losing that unsettled intimacy. Find Me follows Joy through a memory-destroying pandemic and a search for the mother who abandoned her. The Third Hotel sends a grieving widow to Havana, where she begins following a man who looks exactly like her dead husband. In both books, mystery works on two levels at once: it keeps the plot moving, but it also opens up deeper questions about grief, identity, marriage, and the stories people tell themselves to survive.

Then came I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, a collection full of women on the verge, and State of Paradise, her Florida novel of ghostwriting, family secrets, tech unease, and a town that seems to be slipping sideways out of reality. Readers who love van den Berg tend to love that tilt in her work. The strange details are never there just to decorate the page. They press on loneliness, sisterhood, memory, and the ways a self can break apart and re-form.

Her books are strange, but they are never chilly.

Over the years, the wider world has caught up to what longtime readers already knew. She has won the Bard Fiction Prize and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, and later received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. The Third Hotel was a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and I Hold a Wolf by the Ears was named one of the best fiction books of 2020 by Time.

These days, van den Berg is based in the Hudson Valley with her husband, the writer Paul Yoon, and their dog, Oscar. She teaches fiction at Harvard University. She also boxes in amateur competitions and has written about the overlap between boxing and writing.