Sarah Lyu Books in Order

If you want her breakout toxic-friendship thriller: The Best Lies
If you want a queer suspense story about grief and ambition: I Will Find You Again
If you want to read everything in publication order: The Best Lies → I Will Find You Again

Sarah Lyu grew up outside Atlanta, Georgia, and later graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. She writes young adult fiction that heads straight toward big feelings, messy choices, and the way love, fear, ambition, and memory can knot together.

She seems especially interested in relationships that feel like shelter until they start to feel like a trap.

Lyu has said she loves young adult fiction because the teen years are full of firsts and sharp turns. It's the point when people start to see the world's complexity and figure out where they fit. She has named E. Lockhart as a favorite and often returns to The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

The seed of The Best Lies came from her bond with a best friend when they were in their early twenties, sharing a tiny New York City apartment. Then she read about the Parker-Hulme murder case, the real-life case behind Heavenly Creatures, and found the darker shape of the story she wanted to tell.

That debut follows Remy Tsai as she tries to understand the night her best friend, Elise, shot her boyfriend, Jack. Lyu has said the book changed a lot in draft after draft, and that the final structure clicked once she framed the story through Remy's later questioning. The result is part mystery, part postmortem of a friendship.

She has said the best part of writing is getting lost in character conversations, while the hardest part is plot and structure.

Her second novel, I Will Find You Again, keeps the suspense but shifts the focus to Chase Ohara and Lia Vestiano, childhood best friends who fall in love before Lia disappears. Set in Meadowlark on Long Island, the book brings together grief, perfectionism, first love, and secrets. Lyu has said Chase grew in part from her own high school experiences and the pressure to be perfect.

She later wrote openly about depression and suicidal thinking, and that honesty helps explain the force beneath her fiction. In a personal essay tied to I Will Find You Again, she described years of harsh self-talk and a time when success on paper did not quiet the pain underneath. Her books turn those feelings into story without making them feel like lectures.

Across both novels, the through line is clear. Lyu is drawn to obsessive friendship, first love, grief, trauma, secrecy, and the gap between how a life looks from the outside and how it feels from within. Her characters often want control, or at least the feeling of it, and that want drives much of the tension.

Off the page, she sounds observant and curious. She has talked about loving hikes, painting, the scent of the ocean, and hearing other people's stories. She has also mentioned two dogs, milky tea, and books that make people cry. That mix fits her work, which is tense on the surface but deeply interested in hurt, hope, and being understood.