Paula McLain Books in Order

If you want her breakthrough historical fiction: The Paris Wife → Circling the Sun → Love and Ruin
If you like real women at the center of history: Circling the Sun → Love and Ruin → Skylark
If you want something darker and more suspenseful: When the Stars Go Dark
If you want the personal backstory first: Like Family → A Ticket to Ride
If you want her poetry roots: Less of Her → Stumble, Gorgeous

Paula McLain was born in Fresno, California, in 1965. When she was still young, she and her two sisters were abandoned by their parents and entered the California foster care system. They spent the next fourteen years moving from home to home, an experience McLain later wrote about with painful clarity in Like Family. It is also the deep emotional ground beneath much of her later work.

That experience never left her.

After aging out of the system, McLain supported herself through all sorts of jobs, including work as a nurse's aide in a convalescent hospital, a pizza delivery girl, an auto-plant worker, and a cocktail waitress. Writing was not the neat, early plan. It came after real life, and maybe because of real life. She eventually went to the University of Michigan and earned an MFA in poetry in 1996.

Poetry came first.

Her first books were the poetry collections Less of Her and Stumble, Gorgeous. Even before she turned to longer prose, you can see the things that would stay with her: close emotional pressure, sharp images, damaged people trying to keep going, and a musical sentence that never gets too fancy for its own good. Then came Like Family, her memoir about foster care, sisterhood, and the stubborn work of staying connected when the adults around you keep failing. It is hard to read in places, but never self-pitying.

Her first novel, A Ticket to Ride, is set during a long Illinois summer in 1973 and follows a girl named Jamie as she falls under the spell of her older cousin Fawn. What starts as admiration slowly curdles into dread. Readers who come to McLain through the later historical novels are often surprised by how much of her later work is already here: the pull of dangerous charisma, the confusion of love and loyalty, and the cost of mistaking freedom for carelessness.

With The Paris Wife, she found a larger audience and a form that suited her especially well. The novel follows Hadley Richardson and her marriage to Ernest Hemingway in 1920s Chicago and Paris, but the real trick of the book is that McLain keeps the focus on Hadley as a person, not just a footnote to a famous man. That same instinct shapes Circling the Sun, which takes on Beryl Markham in colonial Kenya, and Love and Ruin, which centers Martha Gellhorn as she reports on war and tries not to lose herself inside Hemingway's orbit. McLain is drawn again and again to women who want work, movement, and room to become themselves.

She has also worked well at shorter length. A Mind of Her Own imagines Marie Sklodowska in Paris before the world knew her as Marie Curie, caught between scientific purpose and unexpected love. Ash Wednesday turns to a real 1908 school fire in Ohio and the wreckage, suspicion, and grief left behind. These smaller works show the same interest in private lives pressed hard by history.

Then she shifted, at least on the surface, into suspense.

In When the Stars Go Dark, missing persons detective Anna Hart returns to Mendocino after a devastating personal loss and finds herself pulled into a new disappearance that stirs up old wounds. The setting is contemporary, but the emotional terrain is familiar: childhood trauma, memory, foster care, and the long shadow of violence. Her recent novel Skylark brings her back to Paris again, moving between the seventeenth century and the years around the German occupation, and linking art, confinement, resistance, and survival across time.

What readers often like most about McLain is not just the research or the settings, though those matter. It is the way she writes women who are restless, watchful, ambitious, and not always easy to sort out. Her books move through Paris cafes, African horse farms, war zones, the Northern California coast, and the hidden spaces beneath a city, but the question underneath is often the same: how do you build a self when history, family, love, or loss keeps trying to name you first?

Her essays have appeared in major magazines and newspapers, and over the years she has received support from places like Yaddo, MacDowell, the Ohio Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Ohio with her family.