Nicole Baart Books in Order

Nicole Baart was born and raised in a small town in Iowa, and the shape of that place still shows up all over her fiction. She has said she wanted to be a writer from the time she was a little girl. Part of that came from a hard start: she was born with a birth defect, spent a lot of time in hospitals, and learned early that books could be both escape and comfort when the world felt scary.

Her parents helped build that habit. They brought home stacks of library books and read to her through surgeries and long recoveries, which gave reading a strong emotional charge from the beginning. Years later, when Baart started writing novels of her own, that sense of story as refuge never really left. Even at her most suspenseful, her books stay close to pain, tenderness, and the need people have to be seen.

Writing was never a side thought.

Before publication, she worked plenty of other jobs, from lifeguarding and waitressing to retail and even ranch work on a dairy farm. In college she changed majors four times before settling into English, Spanish, English as a second language, and secondary education. She went on to teach and develop curriculum in three school districts, and time spent living in Vancouver, British Columbia, left a mark too. Those years around classrooms and lesson plans sharpened her eye for the pressures young people carry, something that comes through in her teenage and young adult characters.

Her first complete novel came together while she was taking a break from teaching to be home with her children. She now holds dual American and Canadian citizenship and still considers British Columbia a second home. She has also talked about writing longhand, which feels fitting for a novelist so interested in memory, rhythm, and the messy first draft of real life. She has said that writing by hand helps silence her inner critic and keep her moving.

Readers first met one of Baart's key characters in After the Leaves Fall, the opening Julia DeSmit novel. That book and its two follow-ups are coming-of-age stories set in small-town Iowa, and they care deeply about grief, faith, family, and the slow work of starting over. They also show something Baart would keep returning to: women trying to rebuild a life after loss, while carrying more history than anyone around them quite understands.

Later books lean more openly into suspense. In Sleeping in Eden, a present-day death investigation collides with an older story of first love and buried secrets. Little Broken Things begins with a frightened child handed off in the dark, Everything We Didn't Say returns to an unsolved Iowa murder, and Where He Left Me traps a newlywed at a remote mountain homestead after her husband disappears. Readers who like her work usually talk about the emotional pull first, then the suspense that sneaks up on them.

Iowa never really leaves her books.

Again and again, Baart returns to Midwestern towns, farmhouses, rivers, churches, and close communities where everybody knows a version of the truth. Even when her stories roam farther, to British Columbia, Alaska, or the mountains of Washington State, the emotional map stays familiar: mothers and daughters, sisters, marriages under strain, old wounds, and the uneasy overlap between love and secrecy.

Off the page, Baart is also a co-founder of One Body One Hope, a nonprofit with long ties to Monrovia, Liberia. She and her husband were drawn into that work through adoption and friendship, and she has spoken often about orphan care, parenthood, and global issues. She lives with her family in a small town in Iowa, spends as much time outside as she can, and brings that mix of prairie steadiness and big feeling into nearly everything she writes.