Stephanie Perkins Books in Order

If you want the core YA romances: Anna and the French Kiss → Lola and the Boy Next Door → Isla and the Happily Ever After
If you want a teen slasher first: There's Someone Inside Your House → The Woods Are Always Watching
If you want an adult slow-burn romance: Overdue

Stephanie Perkins was born in South Carolina and raised in Arizona, where she went to public schools and grew up far from the Paris streets and San Francisco neighborhoods that later became such vivid parts of her fiction. She has said she always loved story and was always a pretty good writer, but the real turning point came in college. In a journalism class, she realized she was in the wrong building. She didn't want to chase facts and interviews, she wanted to invent characters.

That clarity seems to have stuck.

Perkins attended universities in California and Georgia, lived in San Francisco for a year, and moved to the mountains of North Carolina in 2004. Before she became a full-time novelist, she worked with books in the most direct way possible, first as a bookseller and then as a librarian. That long time spent around shelves, readers, and story talk shows up in her work. Even when the plots get big, her books keep a close eye on the small things people notice, dodge, and hide from one another.

Her best-known novel, Anna and the French Kiss, arrived in 2010 and quickly became the book many readers still associate with her name. The setup is simple and smart: Anna Oliphant is sent from Atlanta to boarding school in Paris, where friendship, homesickness, and bad timing collide with a crush on Étienne St. Clair. Perkins has said the idea began with a dream about a beautiful boy with a French name and an English accent sitting on the steps of the Panthéon. She later spent a month in Paris doing research, and readers tend to love how the book balances wish-fulfillment romance with awkward, believable feelings.

The companion novels Lola and the Boy Next Door and Isla and the Happily Ever After widened that world without losing the intimacy. Lola shifts to San Francisco and follows a costume-loving heroine whose life is thrown off balance when childhood feelings return with the boy next door. Isla goes back to the School of America in Paris and tracks a relationship that has to survive family pressure, college decisions, and the question of what happens after the first rush of getting together. Across all three books, Perkins is especially good at yearning, banter, and teenagers who are trying very hard to seem more certain than they really are.

She likes romance, but she also likes nerves.

That darker streak came to the front in There's Someone Inside Your House and The Woods Are Always Watching. Perkins has said she was an extremely frightened child, then became a horror fan as a teenager after seeing Scream in 1996, because it made her feel brave instead of helpless. Those books keep her interest in friendship and first love, but place it inside slasher and survival stories. There's Someone Inside Your House, about Makani Young and a string of killings at her Nebraska high school, was later adapted into a film.

Editing has been another part of her career. She put together the anthologies My True Love Gave to Me and Summer Days and Summer Nights, both of them built around the kind of emotional turning points she writes so well. She has also said that she loves editing, which makes sense. Her books often feel carefully arranged, with settings, side characters, and romantic tension all nudging one another into place.

Now Perkins still lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband, Jarrod. She has shared that every room in their house is painted a different color of the rainbow, and that they have two ginger cats. Her 2025 novel Overdue moved into adult romance, following a twenty-nine-year-old librarian whose long relationship suddenly stops feeling settled. It is a new lane for her, but also a familiar one. Books, longing, and people trying to figure out what they really want are still right at the center.