Peter Bognanni Books in Order

If you want the breakout novel: The House of Tomorrow
If you want grief, humor, and a strong YA voice: Things I'm Seeing Without You → This Book Is Not Yet Rated
If you want art, movies, and found family: This Book Is Not Yet Rated → The House of Tomorrow
If you want the newest, highest-stakes story: How to Lose Yourself Completely

Peter Bognanni grew up in Iowa, and he seems drawn to the kids who live a little off to the side of the main crowd. That tracks with the way he has described his own younger self. In interviews, he has talked about taking puppetry classes, making long homemade comedy tapes, and writing fan letters to cartoonists. Even before he published a novel, he was already chasing the mix of oddness, humor, and obsession that runs through his work.

Writing became more than a pastime in college. Bognanni has said that a run of creative writing classes made him think seriously about the craft and about the kind of life he wanted. He studied at Macalester College, then went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and somewhere along the way the habit turned into a vocation.

He stuck with it.

His debut novel, The House of Tomorrow, arrived in 2010 and quickly made people pay attention. The book follows Sebastian Prendergast, a sheltered teenager raised in an Iowa geodesic dome by a grandmother devoted to Buckminster Fuller. When Sebastian falls in with Jared Whitcomb, a heart transplant survivor with punk records and a rebellious streak, the story opens into a funny, awkward, warm novel about friendship and self-invention. It won the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction and an Alex Award, and it was later adapted into a feature film.

Bognanni's next books moved toward young adult fiction, but they kept a lot of the same things readers liked in the first novel. Things I'm Seeing Without You is about grief, first love, and the strange ways people keep talking to the dead. This Book Is Not Yet Rated follows Ethan Ashby, a movie-obsessed teenager trying to save a worn-down cinema while sorting through first love and the loss of his father. Both books are funny in the middle of painful situations, which is one of Bognanni's strengths.

He likes outsiders.

A lot of his stories are about young people who feel misplaced, then find each other through art, music, movies, or sheer stubbornness. His characters grieve, panic, mess things up, and keep going. Even when the setup is unusual, a dome house, an alternative funeral business, a failing movie theater, the feelings are recognizably human. That mix of weird premise and emotional directness is a big part of why his books connect.

That thread continues in How to Lose Yourself Completely, published in 2026. The novel follows Case, an anxious teen reeling from his brother's death who ends up on a wilderness therapy trip that turns into a survival story. It sounds like a sharp turn, but it really isn't. Bognanni is still interested in the same things: grief, friendship, the stories we tell ourselves, and the hard work of finding a way back to other people.

His work hasn't stayed only on the page. The House of Tomorrow became a film, and Things I'm Seeing Without You has been in development for television. He has also written short stories, essays, and humor pieces, and his interest in film shows up off the page too, including screenwriting work and a Film Independent Screenwriting Fellowship. In 2013, he received the Rome Prize, which gave him time in Rome to focus on a new novel.

These days he teaches creative writing at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota. That feels like a good fit. His books are full of the kinds of questions that good teachers, and good novelists, keep asking: what do we do with grief, what do we love enough to fight for, and how do awkward people find their place in the world?