Tara Conklin Books in Order

Tara Conklin was born on St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands and grew up in western Massachusetts. She has described herself as a serious childhood reader, spending plenty of time at the library in her small hometown and assuming, at least for a while, that she might someday write.

At Yale, she studied history, a subject that still shows up in her interest in how private lives meet larger social forces. Her education later took her to NYU School of Law and the Fletcher School at Tufts, where she earned a Master of Law and Diplomacy.

Her path to fiction wasn't straight. In her twenties she travelled and worked for an international human rights organization in New York, then practiced law at corporate firms in London and New York. The work gave her a close view of institutions, rules, and the pressures people carry into a room.

For years, writing stayed mostly private.

She wrote short fiction, journals, and pieces that began and ended in drafts, fitting them around a demanding legal career and family life. During maternity leave after the birth of her first child, a story about Josephine Bell began to take hold. Conklin kept working on it, ultimately left law, and spent years shaping the novel that became The House Girl.

That decision changed the shape of her working life.

Published in 2013, The House Girl moves between 1852 Virginia and 2004 New York. It pairs Josephine, an enslaved young woman planning her escape, with Lina Sparrow, a junior lawyer investigating a reparations case and the hidden history behind a celebrated artist's work. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was translated into eight languages.

Her next novel, The Last Romantics, looks at the Skinner siblings from a childhood marked by their father's death through the messy years that follow. Framed by the memories of Fiona, now an elderly poet, it makes room for loyalty, resentment, grief, illness, and the ways brothers and sisters can become one another's backup plan. It was published in 2019 and also became a New York Times bestseller.

In Community Board, Conklin shifts to a contemporary small town in western Massachusetts. Darcy Clipper returns home after her life falls apart, and a local message board becomes one route into friendships, arguments, and a chance to rethink what she owes the people around her. The novel keeps the focus close to everyday lives while making room for humor.

Her books don't repeat a single formula. The first builds suspense through research and a divided timeline, the second stays with one family over decades, and the third finds drama in neighborhood life and online posts. What connects them is attention to people trying to act when their old plans no longer work.

Across these books, Conklin returns to families, women making hard choices, long memory, and communities that can both shelter and complicate a person. Her stories often put a character's private problem beside a wider question, whether it is history, money, care, work, or belonging.

Conklin lives in Seattle with her family. Alongside writing, she teaches at Hugo House and The Novelry, bringing the practical persistence that carried her from spare writing hours into a life centered on fiction.