Nan Rossiter Books in Order

For Cape Cod family drama: The Gin & Chowder Club → Christmas on Cape Cod → Under a Summer Sky
For island second chances: Nantucket → Summer Dance
For faith and family on Tybee Island: Promises of the Heart → Promises to Keep → A Good Measure
For her picture books first: Rugby and Rosie → The Way Home → Sugar on Snow

Nan Rossiter was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and grew up first in Pelham, then in Barkhamsted, Connecticut. One of her earliest memories is riding a green Stingray bike to the Pelham Library, where she fell hard for books and for characters like Harriet the Spy, Laura Ingalls, and Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

That love of reading never really left.

She was also a kid who liked to draw. After Northwestern Regional 7 High School, she studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated in 1986. She then spent years working as a freelance illustrator, and that visual way of seeing still shows up in her fiction, especially in the rooms, kitchens, porches, and shorelines readers can picture so clearly.

Her writing life began with children's books. In the early 1990s, inspired by someone raising a guide-dog puppy, she started work on Rugby and Rosie. The book went on to win Nebraska's Golden Sower Award. She later published The Way Home, which was named a notable children's book by Smithsonian magazine, as well as Sugar on Snow and the Cape Cod based The Fo'c'sle.

Adult fiction came later.

When The Gin & Chowder Club appeared in 2011, it opened the door to the kind of novels Rossiter is now best known for, warm family stories with real hurt underneath them. In Words Get in the Way and More Than You Know, she writes about parents and children, sisters, grief, old love, and the way the past keeps tugging at the present.

Place matters in her books.

Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Tybee Island are more than pretty backdrops in Rossiter's work. Nantucket and Summer Dance lean into second chances, island memory, and family secrets that do not stay buried. The Savannah Skies novels, starting with Promises of the Heart, head south to coastal Georgia and bring together romance, faith, foster care, widowhood, and community. Readers who love her books often point to the same pleasures, believable relationships, everyday tenderness, dogs that matter, and endings that leave a little light on.

Across her fiction, a few themes keep returning. She writes often about mothers and sons, sisterhood, marriage, friendship, and the slow work of repairing a life after loss. Even when a book deals with miscarriage, illness, betrayal, or loneliness, she tends to stay grounded in the daily things that help people carry on, meals, chores, conversations on the porch, and the relief of being truly known.

Rossiter's readership has grown far beyond New England, and she has been a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. Her novel Summer Dance won the 2018 Nancy Pearl Award. She lives on a quiet country road in Connecticut with her husband and a black Lab named Finn, while their two sons are grown and out in the world. Finn is known for waking up at the sound of a banana being peeled.