Tom Ryan Books in Order

For small-town YA mysteries: Keep This to Yourself → I Hope You're Listening
For queer coming-of-age stories: Way to Go → Tag Along → When You Get the Chance
For quick middle grade reads: Totally Unrelated → Big Time → Pop Quiz
For dog memoirs: Following Atticus → Will's Red Coat
For adult seaside mysteries: The Treasure Hunters Club → Return to Breakneck Island

Tom Ryan is the name on two different writing careers gathered on this page.

Most of the fiction here belongs to the Canadian novelist, screenwriter, and producer Tom Ryan, who was born and raised in Inverness, Nova Scotia. He has said that growing up in rural Cape Breton, before the internet and with limited television, made books his best friends. He later studied at Mount Allison University and NSCC, where screen arts taught him how stories are built.

For a while he worked in film and then in recruitment. The real push toward fiction came after he moved to the west coast with his partner and finally gave himself time to try the novel he had wanted to write for years. That first book became Way to Go in 2012, and it later made the ALA Rainbow List and was chosen as one of the most significant books in Nova Scotia's history.

From there he wrote for different age groups, including Tag Along, Totally Unrelated, Big Time, Pop Quiz, and, with Robin Stevenson, When You Get the Chance. Readers tend to come to these books for the humor, the music, the awkward crushes, the prom-night disasters, and the warm attention Ryan gives kids who are still figuring out who they are. Nova Scotia shows up a lot too, especially in the small-town rhythms and the sense that leaving home is never a simple decision.

His later novels lean harder into mystery. Keep This to Yourself follows Mac Bell back into a seaside murder case that never really ended, and it went on to win the ITW Thriller Award and the Arthur Ellis Award. I Hope You're Listening mixes a missing-person case with a true crime podcast and won a Lambda Award, while The Treasure Hunters Club and We Had a Hunch bring that same love of twists to adult readers. Even when the plots get dark, his books usually stay close to friendship, grief, queer identity, and the strange pull of home.

Nova Scotia stays in the work.

He has also said that what he learned in screen arts, making sure all the pieces are in place before telling a story, still shapes how he plots. More recently he has described himself as dividing his time between Dartmouth and Inverness, and his official bio says he lives in Nova Scotia with his husband and their dog. That mix of home ground and careful structure explains a lot about why even his busiest mysteries feel personal.

The memoirs Following Atticus and Will's Red Coat, though, come from a different Tom Ryan. He founded and edited the Newburyport, Massachusetts newspaper The Undertoad, sold it in 2007, and moved to New Hampshire's White Mountains with his dog Atticus M. Finch. In Following Atticus, grief and a charity challenge send man and dog toward New Hampshire's forty-eight 4,000-foot peaks in winter. Will's Red Coat turns to an older rescue dog who was expected to have only a short time left, and finds a tougher, sweeter story about trust, patience, and starting again.

If the range on this page feels wide, that is why. The books gathered under Tom Ryan do not all come from one career, but they do share a fondness for character, strong settings, and lives that get knocked off course before they find a way forward.