Lori Nelson Spielman Books in Order

If you want the best place to begin: The Life List
If you want another emotional contemporary story next: The Life List → Sweet Forgiveness
If you want travel, family lore, and romance: The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany
If your edition uses the UK title for the Italy novel: One Italian Summer

Lori Nelson Spielman was born in Lansing, Michigan, and grew up in a working-class family in the Lansing area. Long before she published a novel, she was drawn to books, language, and the small human dramas that come from putting people together and watching what they do.

Her route to fiction was anything but direct. She holds master's degrees in speech pathology and guidance counseling. Before turning fully to writing, she worked as a speech pathologist, a guidance counselor, and then a homebound teacher in an inner-city school district, working with students in their homes and in hospitals. That job brought her close to worry, grit, humor, and family strain.

That work stayed with her.

Spielman has said that teaching an English course, and writing short vignettes for students, helped wake up her old love of storytelling. She started taking writing classes at Lansing Community College, went to conferences, and kept learning the slow, practical way. She did not grow up expecting to be a novelist, and by her own account she came to that dream as an adult.

Then an old list changed everything.

While going through a cedar box, she found the life list she had written as a teenager. That discovery helped spark The Life List, her 2013 debut, in which Brett Bohlinger is pushed back toward the dreams she once abandoned. Readers tend to connect with the book's mix of grief, romance, family pressure, and second chances, plus the very human question at its center: what happened to the person you meant to become?

The book gave Spielman a wide audience, reaching readers in many countries, and it later became a film. She followed it with Sweet Forgiveness, a novel about a New Orleans talk show host, a public apology craze, and the old pain between a mother and daughter. What people often like in that story is the moral messiness. Nobody gets to stay comfortably right for long.

Her later novel The Star-Crossed Sisters of Tuscany, published in some markets as One Italian Summer, opens outward into Italy, family lore, buried history, and the idea of a curse haunting generations of second-born daughters. It still feels very much like a Spielman book. There is romance, yes, but also women trying to sort out inheritance, expectation, identity, and the stories families keep telling long after they stop being helpful.

Across her books, certain threads keep returning. She writes about mother-daughter knots, family secrets, ordinary women at turning points, and the uneasy gap between the life that looks good from the outside and the life that actually fits. Her settings matter too, from Chicago and New Orleans to Brooklyn, Tuscany, Venice, and the Amalfi Coast. Place is never just backdrop in her fiction.

Spielman has described her own style as straightforward and emotionally driven, and that feels right. Her novels move quickly, but they still make room for regret, humor, tenderness, and the hard work of changing course. She lives in Michigan with her husband. Travel, reading, and staying active still seem to fit naturally into the life around the books.