Rebecca Serle Books in Order

If you want her most talked-about novels: In Five Years → One Italian Summer → Expiration Dates.
If your book club loves emotional what-if stories: The Dinner List → In Five Years → Once and Again.
If you're in the mood for YA Hollywood glamour: Famous in Love → Truly, Madly, Famously.
If you prefer teen romance with a classic twist: When You Were Mine (also published as Rosaline) → The Edge of Falling.

Rebecca Serle is an American author and television writer who builds contemporary love stories around small, surprising twists of fate. Her novel In Five Years became a New York Times bestseller and a popular book club pick, and her Famous in Love series was adapted for television.(en.wikipedia.org)

Serle grew up in Maui and later also spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles, soaking up sunshine and stories in equal measure. She was an avid reader who started writing early, but it took time before she saw storytelling as something that could become her full-time work.(barnesandnoble.com)

She studied English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, then headed east to earn her MFA in writing from The New School in New York City. During those years she worked inside the book world, interning at publishers and literary agencies, reading slush piles and learning how stories move from draft to finished book. That behind-the-scenes apprenticeship helped her see both the art and the business of publishing up close.(lapl.org)

In her mid-twenties Serle wrote what would become her debut, When You Were Mine, a modern retelling of Romeo and Juliet told by Rosaline, the girl Shakespeare left at the edges of the play. She has spoken about drawing on her own early heartbreaks to capture the intensity of first love and first loss on the page. That novel later inspired the film Rosaline, bringing her fascination with classic love stories into a new medium.(rebeccaserle.com)

She followed it with The Edge of Falling and the two-book Famous in Love series, shifting from suburban streets and New York penthouses to the blinding lights of Hollywood. Those books track ordinary teen Paige Townsen as she is cast in the film adaptation of a hit YA franchise and thrust into a world of red carpets, social media scandals, and a very public love triangle. Serle went on to co-create and co-executive produce the Freeform television adaptation, trading the solitude of novel-writing for a bustling set and writers room.(simonandschuster.com)

Her adult fiction grew out of the same interest in relationships and second chances. The Dinner List imagines a thirtieth-birthday dinner with five guests, living or dead, including an ex-fiance, a beloved professor, and Audrey Hepburn, using a single evening to unpack years of love and regret. With In Five Years, Serle sends a tightly wound Manhattan lawyer into a vivid vision of her life five years in the future, then watches what happens when that vision starts to press against reality.(rebeccaserle.com)

More recent novels like One Italian Summer and Expiration Dates continue that pattern of quiet magic layered over everyday life. In one, a grieving daughter travels to the Amalfi Coast and encounters her mother as a young woman, getting to know her not just as Mom but as a person with her own hopes and doubts. In the other, a woman who has always received slips of paper predicting the length of each relationship finally meets a man whose note has no end date, forcing her to ask whether fate is a comfort or a cage.(simonandschuster.com)

Serle’s forthcoming novel Once and Again centers on three generations of women in the Novak family, each granted a single chance to turn back time and redo one moment in her life. Set largely in Malibu, it follows Lauren Novak as she returns home, reconnects with her parents, and faces the pull of a first love she thought she had left behind.(rebeccaserle.com)

Across both her YA and adult work, certain threads repeat: intense female friendships, complicated mothers and daughters, the pressure of ambition, and the ways love can be both anchor and disruption. She has said she is especially interested in the tension between fate and free will, and her stories often hinge on one surreal twist that throws an otherwise realistic life into question.(lapl.org)

Today Serle writes full time, moving between novels and screen projects. After years of splitting her time between New York and Los Angeles, she now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter, leaning on yoga, coffee, and close friendships to balance the intensity of making stories for a wide, devoted readership.(simonandschuster.com)