Gabrielle Zevin Books In Order

Publication Order of Birthright Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Gabrielle Zevin
Gabrielle Zevin is a critically acclaimed and internationally best-selling author, whose books have been translated into 39 languages. She is a Harvard University graduate.

“The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry spent several months on the New York Times Bestseller List, was a USA Today Bestseller, and it reached #1 on the National Indie Bestseller list, and was a bestseller all around the world. It was honored with the Southern California Independent Booksellers Award for Fiction and the Japan Booksellers’ Prize, and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, among some other honors.

“Margarettetown” was longlisted for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program. “The Hole We’re In” was a New York Times Editor’s Choice title. “Young Jane Young” won the Southern Book Prize and it was also one of Washington Post’s Fifty Notable Works of Fiction.

Gabrielle has also written for younger readers. “Elsewhere” was an American Library Association Notable Children’s Book, a finalist for the California Young Reader Medal and the Quill Award, and was also longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. The book won the Ulmer Unke, the Borders Original Voices Award, and the Sakura Medal. It was named to Time magazine’s 100 Best YA Novels of All Time in 2021.

Gabrielle is the screenwriter of “Conversations with Other Women” for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. She and Hans Canosa (a director) adapted her novel “Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac” (NYPL Books for the Teenage and ALA Best Books for Young Adults) into a Japanese film.

Zevin has also written criticism occasionally for NPR’s All Things Considered and the New York Times Book Review. She started her writing career at the age of fourteen as a music critic for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

“Margarettetown” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2005. The most extraordinary love story that you will ever read. It could be about anybody: your parents, you, or your best friends. However it is not. It is about a woman named Margaret Towne, and the man that falls in love with her.

The day that he meets Maggie for the very first time is the same exact day that he understands what it is to be in love. Wildly, terminally, and deeply in love. What he cannot yet know is that loving her means loving many women all at once.

After an intense and brief courtship these two young lovers set off to meet Maggie’s family: Maggie, Margaret, Mia, Marge, and May. Five women of different ages, all live in a house called Margaron together, in a place known as Margarettown. There is nothing in Maggie’s world quite like it is anywhere else.

Part fable, part memoir, and part journey through the many worlds of a single woman, this is a novel about how love takes us over completely and changes our very lives. How it makes truth out of lies and lies out of truth. This is the story about what it takes to love the same person for a lifetime, and about the impossibility of truly knowing anything about who it is that we have come to love.

“All These Things I’ve Done” is the first novel in the “Birthright” series and was released in 2011. 2083. Coffee and chocolate are illegal, while water is rationed out carefully, paper is tough to find, and New York City is rife with poverty and crime.

Yet, for Anya Balanchine, a sixteen year old daughter of the city’s most notorious (and dead) crime boss, life is pretty routine. It is made up of going to school, caring for her siblings and her dying grandma, attempting to avoid fall in love with the son of the new assistant DA, and avoiding her loser ex-boyfriend.

That is up until her ex accidentally gets poisoned by the chocolate that her family manufactures and the cops think she’s to blame. All of a sudden, she unwillingly is thrust into the spotlight: in the news, at school, and most importantly, within her own mafia family.

“Because It is My Blood” is the second novel in the “Birthright” series and was released in 2012. Anya, having been freed from jail, hopes that things are going to start returning to normal. However life on the outside is more dangerous than life locked up. Some of her gangland family seek revenge for the crime she did time for: her uncle’s shooting.

Anya, forced to flee the country, hides out in a cacao plantation down in Mexico. While there, she learns all the secrets of the chocolate trade, which is illegal and lethal in her native New York. She also learns that apparently acts of random violence carried out around the world have one target: her family. While innocent bystanders wind up getting caught in the crossfire, she has to act fast and decisively in order to stop it, no matter what the danger to herself might be.

“In the Age of Love and Chocolate” is the third novel in the “Birthright” series and was released in 2013. For Anya Balanchine, now age eighteen, life has been more bitter than sweet. She’s lost her grandmother and her parents, and has spent the better part of her high school years getting in trouble with the law. Possibly the toughest of all is her choice to open up a nightclub with Charles Delacroix, her old nemesis, which has cost her relationship with Win.

It’s still her nature to soldier on. She puts the loss of Win behind her and focuses on her work. Against all odds, the nightclub is a major success, and Anya feels as though she is on her way and nothing is going to go wrong for her. However after one horrible misjudgment leaves her fighting for her life, she’s forced to reckon with her decisions and allow people to help her for the first time ever.

This is the story of growing up and learning what love truly is.