Rebecca Branch Books in Order

Rebecca Branch grew up between New York and Europe, with an American archaeologist father and an Italian mother who wrote and made art. Her childhood included moves through Florence, Rome, Paris, London, and New York City, as well as time spent around archaeological excavations with her father. Those early years gave her a lasting interest in old places, objects, and the stories people attach to them.

Rome became especially important to her work.

Branch studied art history at the University of California, Berkeley, then returned to New York for further study at Parsons School of Design and graduate classes at Columbia. She also worked at the Metropolitan Museum in its Greco-Roman arts area, an experience that helped shape the museum collections, ancient artifacts, and historical detail that later appear in her fiction.

Before publishing novels, she built a career in design and architecture. She has also worked as an interior designer and modeled during college and into her early thirties. It is an unusual route into romance writing, but it makes sense on the page: her books pay close attention to rooms, buildings, clothing, art, food, and the atmosphere of a city.

She started writing fiction in October 2013 after a family-history writing challenge from her daughter. A dinner-party conversation about first love and loss of innocence helped turn that material into a story. Branch then began shaping a Rome-set romance that mixed memory, art history, and the social changes of the early 1970s.

That project became The Summer I Lost It, the opening book in her Summer of 71 sequence. It follows Molly and Max through a summer in Rome, where an unexpected meeting grows into a relationship complicated by age, experience, and the knowledge that summer cannot last forever. The later books, Loved, Killed & Eaten and Of Cocks and Hens, stay with the pair as their world opens up beyond that first encounter.

Branch also writes time-travel romance. In the Time Keepers books, beginning with Great Caesar's Ghost, art historian Maximillian DuPont finds that antiquities can do far more than sit safely behind museum glass. A Roman Holiday, Out of Time's Abyss, and Love in the Arc of Time combine romance with trips through Roman and Renaissance history, using the past as both an adventure and a test of the characters' choices.

Her work often returns to Rome, but it is not simply travel fiction with love scenes added. Branch is interested in people rebuilding their lives, crossing social and age differences, and learning what they want from a relationship. Art, architecture, history, food, humor, and emotional recovery all have a place in the mix.

The Turnip books, created with Jessica Rossi, take a more personal route. They move between memoir-like reflection and a fictionalized Roman romance, including A Modern Roman Holiday. Across her bibliography, Branch keeps returning to the same big question: what happens when a person decides it is not too late to start again?

Alongside writing, she has worked in design and lectured on Roman art and architecture. That background is everywhere in her books, usually arriving through a museum object, a street corner, a meal, or a tour through Rome rather than a classroom lecture.