Ruta Sepetys Books in Order

If you are new to Ruta Sepetys: Between Shades of Gray → Salt to the Sea → The Fountains of Silence
If you want a tense, modern era thriller: I Must Betray You
If you love atmospheric American historical drama: Out of the Easy → A Fortune of Sand
If you are reading with younger teens: The Bletchley Riddle → Between Shades of Gray: The Graphic Novel
If you are a writer yourself: You: The Story: A Writer's Guide to Craft Through Memory

Ruta Sepetys grew up in Detroit, Michigan, in a family shaped by music, storytelling, and the legacy of war. Her father was a Lithuanian refugee who escaped Soviet occupation, and the quiet weight of his history settled into her imagination early.

She studied international finance at Hillsdale College and spent time at universities in France, expecting a practical career in business. After graduation she moved to Los Angeles, where she worked in the music industry and learned how contracts, tours, and creative work all collide.

Those years led her to launch her own artist management company, representing musicians and songwriters and spending long stretches on the road. She was helping other people build their art, yet kept circling questions about her own family story and the lives that had been interrupted or erased.

Trips to Lithuania finally gave those questions a focus. Sepetys visited former deportation sites, archives, and kitchens where survivors told her what it meant to be taken from home as a teenager. Many of them had never spoken publicly about their experiences. She began to see that a novel might carry their memories to readers who would never encounter that history in a textbook.

The result was Between Shades of Gray, her first novel, which follows a fifteen year old Lithuanian girl deported to a Siberian labor camp in 1941. The book reached readers around the world and was later adapted into the film Ashes in the Snow, bringing that hidden chapter of history to an even wider audience.

Sepetys stayed with historical fiction but moved across time and place. Out of the Easy takes readers to 1950s New Orleans through the eyes of Josie Moraine, who is trying to leave the French Quarter and its brothels behind. Salt to the Sea follows four young people fleeing across East Prussia in 1945 toward the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff. That novel received the Carnegie Medal and helped introduce many readers to a maritime disaster that had largely vanished from public memory.

In The Fountains of Silence, she turns to Madrid in 1957 under Francisco Franco, weaving a story about an American photographer, a Spanish hotel worker, and the long reach of the civil war into the next generation. I Must Betray You moves forward to 1989 Romania, where a seventeen year old boy is forced to inform for the secret police while quietly recording the collapse of a dictatorship. With The Bletchley Riddle, co written with Steve Sheinkin, she writes for middle grade readers about codebreaking siblings at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

She also steps outside pure fiction. You: The Story: A Writer's Guide to Craft Through Memory is a nonfiction guide that mixes pieces of her own life with prompts on plot, character, and voice, encouraging writers to mine their memories for story. Her forthcoming novel A Fortune of Sand returns to her home state, imagining a young woman caught in glamour and danger in Prohibition era Detroit.

Across these books certain patterns repeat. Young people stand at the center of large historical forces. Choices made by governments show up in kitchens, crowded apartments, and frozen fields. Ordinary characters face questions about loyalty, silence, and what it costs to tell the truth.

Sepetys is known for deep research, spending years traveling to locations, reading testimony, and listening to people connected to the events she writes about. Her work has been published in dozens of languages and countries, and she has received honors such as the Carnegie Medal and invitations to speak at institutions that rarely host writers for young readers.

She now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, a city that keeps her close to both music and books. From there she continues to look for overlooked corners of the past, hoping that by telling one specific story at a time, she can help preserve voices that might otherwise be forgotten.