Laura Dave Books in Order

If you want her signature suspense: The Last Thing He Told Me → The First Time I Saw Him.
If you prefer contemporary relationship drama: London is the Best City in America → The Divorce Party → The First Husband.
If you love family stories with wine and food: Eight Hundred Grapes → Hello, Sunshine.
If you want another twisty family mystery: The Night We Lost Him.

Laura Dave writes novels that sit where family life, love, and suspense overlap, following people who are forced to rethink the stories they tell about themselves.

She was born in New York City in 1977 and grew up in nearby Scarsdale, a town that shows up in the emotional landscape of several of her early books. As a kid she was drawn to stories, and by elementary school she was already trying to put her own on paper.

Dave studied English at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1999, then went on to the University of Virginia for an MFA in creative writing. There she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow and earned a Tennessee Williams Scholarship, recognition that helped convince her that the hours spent revising short stories were leading somewhere. After graduate school she worked as a freelance journalist, including a stint writing for ESPN, learning how to report, cut, and polish under deadline.

She has been writing in one form or another ever since.

Her first novel, London is the Best City in America, was published in 2006 after nearly a year of drafting and rewriting. Set around a wedding weekend, it follows Emmy Everett as she returns home and is forced to ask what commitment really looks like. Dave kept circling those questions in her next books, The Divorce Party and The First Husband, which look at couples at very different moments, one marriage ending as another begins, and how people decide whether to stay, to leave, or to reinvent themselves.

Eight Hundred Grapes and Hello, Sunshine marked a shift to California settings and to characters whose lives are wrapped up in work. In the first, a Sonoma winemaking family and a daughter on the brink of marriage wrestle with complicated loyalties and old secrets. In the second, a famous cooking personality watches her carefully curated online persona implode and has to figure out who she is without the filter of fame.

Everything changed again with The Last Thing He Told Me, released in 2021. The book follows Hannah Hall, a woodturner living on a Sausalito houseboat, whose husband disappears in the middle of a corporate scandal, leaving her only a note asking her to protect his teenage daughter. The novel spent well over a year on best seller lists, was chosen for Reese's book club, and reached readers around the world who were drawn to its mix of domestic suspense and a fragile, slowly deepening relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter.

The story also moved to television when it was adapted as a series for Apple TV+. Dave co-created the show and worked on the scripts with her husband, screenwriter Josh Singer, bringing her characters into a new medium without losing the intimacy that made the novel resonate.

More recently, she has leaned even further into family-centered suspense. The Night We Lost Him follows estranged siblings who suspect that their father's fatal fall from a cliffside home was not an accident, while The First Time I Saw Him returns to Hannah and Bailey several years after Owen's disappearance, sending them on the run again as old threats resurface. Both novels keep the pace of a thriller but stay rooted in questions about loyalty, forgiveness, and what people will risk to protect the ones they love.

Alongside her fiction, Dave has written essays and columns for national newspapers and magazines, reflecting on relationships, work, and the pull between ambition and home. She lives in Los Angeles with Singer and their son, and she still treats writing as a daily practice, showing up even on the messy days and trusting that small scenes can add up to lives that feel recognizably human.