Lydia Kiesling Books in Order

If you want to start with motherhood and California: The Golden State
If you want a wider political story: Mobility
If you plan to read both: The Golden State → Mobility

Lydia Kiesling is an American novelist and culture writer whose books pay close attention to the way big systems press on ordinary days. She grew up moving often in a Foreign Service family, and that restless sense of home, place, and partial belonging runs through much of her work.

She studied at Hamilton College. Soon after graduating, she went to Istanbul and taught English to kindergarteners, a year that deepened her interest in Turkish language and culture and stayed with her long after she returned to the United States.

For a while, writing was something she approached from the side. In her mid-twenties she started a blog because she knew she wanted to write but was not yet sure what form it should take, and books became her way in. That work led her to The Millions, where she wrote reviews and essays for years and later became editor in 2016.

She has described another turning point from her time in Pittsburgh, when she felt herself drifting toward office jobs that sat near her interests without quite matching them. So she went back to school to study Turkish and Middle Eastern studies, and later worked at UC Berkeley's Center for Middle Eastern Studies, directing outreach. Language study stayed important to her there too, including time spent studying Uzbek.

Then she made a bigger leap.

Kiesling has said she spent years writing short pieces and vignettes before giving herself permission to try a novel. To finish a draft, she stepped away from full-time work, took on part-time editing, and wrote against the clock while raising a young child. That mix of pressure, child care, money worries, and stubborn persistence sits quietly in the background of her fiction.

The Golden State, published in 2018, follows Daphne, a young mother who leaves San Francisco for the high desert with her toddler while her Turkish husband is stranded abroad by immigration trouble. The novel draws on Kiesling's long connection to northeastern California, where her grandparents lived and where she spent time growing up, and it also uses her knowledge of Turkish and the anxieties that can shape cross-border families. The book was longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and helped earn her a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honor.

She likes putting work on the page.

That is just as clear in Mobility, her 2023 novel, which follows Elizabeth "Bunny" Glenn from teenage years in Azerbaijan to adulthood in and around the oil business. Kiesling has said her own Foreign Service upbringing fed the book, especially the experience of being young in a place shaped by adult geopolitics. The novel brings together coming of age, office life, class, ambition, energy politics, and climate responsibility without losing sight of the person at the center of it.

Outside the novels, Kiesling has published essays and criticism in outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Nation, and The Cut. Her essay work has been recognized in The Best American Essays, and she received a Miller Foundation Spark Award in 2025. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family.