Will Walton Books in Order

Will Walton grew up on a farm outside Perry, Georgia, and the rural South has stayed close to his work. His novels pay attention to small-town life, family ties, friendship, loss, and the private work of figuring out who you are. The setting is not just scenery, it shapes how much people assume they know about one another.

He made an early decision about the kind of life he wanted. In eighth grade, Walton decided he wanted to be a writer. That choice led him to the University of Georgia, rather than the Georgia Tech route he once expected to take like his parents, and he graduated with an English degree in 2013.

Athens became the place where his writing life and book life met.

While still in college, Walton began volunteering as moderator of Avid Bookshop's young readers' book club in 2012. The store hired him as a bookseller the next year. Over time, he took on jobs including inventory manager, events conductor, assistant buyer, and bookseller. He helped with book clubs and events as well as the behind-the-scenes work of connecting books with readers.

He wrote his first novel alongside that bookselling work.

Anything Could Happen, published in 2015, is Walton's debut. It follows fifteen-year-old Richard “Tretch” Farm, a gay teen in a small town who is in love with his straight best friend, Matt. The book makes room for Tretch's longing and uncertainty, but it also cares about his supportive family, his friendship with Matt, and his love of dance. Told in Tretch's close first-person voice, it gives everyday conversations and awkward moments plenty of weight. It became a Summer 2015 Indie Next Pick and a finalist for a 2016 Lambda Literary Award.

Walton started his second novel before the debut had even reached readers, then took a different emotional route with I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain in 2018. Its narrator, Avery Fowell, tries to put a painful summer into words as he deals with an injury, his mother's addiction, questions about sexuality, and the approaching loss of his grandfather, Pal. Prose sits beside Avery's rough poems, and pop music and poetry give him ways to say what ordinary conversation cannot. The book lets Avery's thoughts arrive in fragments, because grief rarely moves in a straight line.

The form is part of the feeling.

Both books feature queer teenage narrators and draw on experiences Walton has discussed from growing up, coming out, and finding his place in the South. He has called Anything Could Happen a love letter to his parents, while describing I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain as an extended eulogy for his grandfather. Those personal starting points help explain why the stories stay focused on messy emotions as well as the people who show up for one another.

Walton's characters aren't looking for neat answers. They write, dance, listen to songs, fall for friends, and try to make sense of adults who are struggling too. Readers who like intimate young adult fiction with humor, tenderness, and room for hard conversations will find two standalone novels that can be read in either order.