Sarah McCoy Books in Order

If you want to start at the beginning: The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico → The Baker's Daughter → The Mapmaker's Children
If you want sweeping historical fiction: The Baker's Daughter → The Mapmaker's Children
If you love classic-world retellings: Marilla of Green Gables
If you want glamour, secrets, and family drama: Mustique Island → Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?

Sarah McCoy was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky, the daughter of a Puerto Rican elementary school teacher and an Army officer from Oklahoma. Because of military life, she moved often as a child and spent part of her early years in Schweinfurt, Germany, before her family settled in Virginia when she was thirteen. After so much moving, she came to think of herself as a Southerner, while still keeping deep family ties to Puerto Rico.

That pull between movement and home shows up again and again in her fiction.

McCoy says she started making little books as a child, long before writing became her job. She grew into the kind of student who hid out in libraries, kept diaries, and wrote whatever she could, poems, stories, school pieces, and reviews. At Virginia Tech she studied journalism and public relations and imagined a future in magazines or broadcasting. After graduation she took a public relations job in Richmond, wrote fiction at night, and realized the work paying the bills was not the work she wanted to do for the rest of her life. She entered the MFA program at Old Dominion University, and there she wrote the novel that became The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico.

Place matters in her books.

Her debut, The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico, grew from visits to her grandparents' farm in Aibonito and follows a girl coming of age on the island during political unrest. The Baker's Daughter, the book that introduced many readers to her work, draws on her childhood in Germany and her years living in El Paso. It moves between wartime Germany and present-day Texas, and asks what ordinary people do when history leaves them no safe, easy choice. The novel was a Goodreads Choice Award nominee for best historical fiction in 2012.

McCoy kept following that thread in The Mapmaker's Children, which pairs the story of John Brown's daughter Sarah Brown with a modern woman wrestling with infertility, memory, and inheritance. In Marilla of Green Gables, she turns to literary history and imagines Marilla Cuthbert's life before Anne arrives at Green Gables. Readers who like McCoy often come for the carefully built settings, but they stay for the women at the center, women trying to do something decent in hard circumstances.

Her later novels show the same curiosity in new landscapes. Mustique Island heads to the Caribbean in the early 1970s, mixing wealth, scandal, and a mother-daughter story on a private island. Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely? moves into Old Hollywood and a convent, following a former movie star whose disappearance becomes a family mystery years later. Even when the backdrop is glamorous, McCoy keeps her eye on faith, family, belonging, and the cost of reinvention.

Outside her novels, she has taught English writing at Old Dominion University and the University of Texas at El Paso. She also hosted the NPR WSNC radio program Bookmarked with Sarah McCoy and served on the board of the literary nonprofit Bookmarks.

She now lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with her husband, Dr. Brian Waterman, their dog Gilbert, and their cat Tularosa. For a writer who grew up moving from place to place, that settled life feels fitting, at least until the next book sends her somewhere new.