Nina de Gramont Books in Order

Nina de Gramont was born in Englewood, New Jersey, on September 3, 1966, and grew up in New Jersey, close enough to New York City for museums, plays, and a wider arts world to feel part of everyday life. Books were everywhere at home. Her mother wrote, her father loved books, and an uncle who worked as a writer and journalist often showed up with stacks of reading.

She was a reader first.

De Gramont has said she loved writing early and never really pictured doing anything else. That came partly from encouragement, and partly from habit: she read all the time, moved quickly from children's books to classics and grown-up novels, and learned young that stories could be both smart and absorbing. You can feel that blend in her work now. Her books care about language, but they also want you to keep turning the page.

She studied English literature at Colorado College, spent time in a graduate writing program at the University of Colorado Boulder, and later earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Those years seem to have helped her balance experiment and storytelling. She has said that one program pushed her toward voice and form, while her natural instinct was always toward story, character, and emotional momentum.

Moving to Wilmington turned out to matter in more than one way. She finished the MFA there after arriving with her husband, writer David Gessner, and has said the program gave her a writing community at a moment when she was building a new life and thinking seriously about teaching. That classroom side of her career stuck. She now teaches creative writing at UNCW.

Short fiction gave her a way in.

Her first book was the story collection Of Cats and Men, and then came the boarding school novel Gossip of the Starlings. From there she moved easily between adult and young adult fiction. Every Little Thing in the World follows a pregnant teenager sent to wilderness camp in Canada. Meet Me at the River folds grief and forbidden love into a ghostly romance. The Boy I Love looks at friendship, secrecy, and acceptance through the eyes of a teenager who sees more than the people around her realize.

That range is part of what makes her bibliography interesting. She writes about girls and women at the moment when life stops being theoretical. Her characters have to choose, and the choices are rarely neat. Love, shame, family pressure, grief, reinvention, and the stories people tell themselves to keep going all show up again and again.

Place matters in her books, too. Cape Cod gives The Last September its lonely pressure and domestic suspense. 1920s England shapes The Christie Affair, her reimagining of Agatha Christie's eleven-day disappearance through the eyes of Archie Christie's mistress, Nan O'Dea. The novel became a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick in February 2022, which introduced many new readers to her work. Her next novel, Peregrine Hill, is scheduled for November 10, 2026 and heads to Gilded Age New York and Rhode Island for a story about money, silence, and the bargains women are pushed to make.

De Gramont has also written under the name Marina Gessner, another sign of how comfortable she is moving between categories and audiences. Through it all, her fiction keeps returning to the same human messes: desire, loyalty, class, memory, and the trouble people cause when they want too much. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with her daughter, her dog Isabelle, and David Gessner.