Michelle Huneven Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Michelle Huneven is a published American author.

She was born in Altadena, California. She says that she was born just a mile from where she currently lived. For her higher education, Michelle hopped among colleges like Scripps, Grinnell, and EWU, eventually ending up at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received her MFA.

Her debut novel was Round Rock, which was released in 1997 by Knopf. It was followed by Jamesland, which came out in 2003. Both of the books ended up being New York Times notable books and became finalists for the LA Times Book Award.

Her following novels were also received positively. Her third novel Blame was released in 2009 from Sarah Crichton Books. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. Her fourth novel Off Course was released in 2014 from Sarah Crichton Books and ended up being a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2022, her fifth novel Search was released and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by NPR.

Michelle has also received help and recognition for her work along the way. She has received a Whiting Award for Fiction, a GE Younger Writers Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship, as well as a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For years, her day job to make ends meet was reviewing restaurants and writing features about food for publications such as the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, among others. She has even received a James Beard award for feature writing with recipes. She has also received other awards for her work doing food journalism.

Michelle now has a new job and works teaching creative writing to undergraduate students at UCLA. She is always working on her upcoming novel and occasionally writes something about food. She is married to her husband Jim Potter. They previously resided in Altadena together with their dog Tatty Jane, the memory of their cat, an African Grey parrot named Helen, two goldfish, and a total of eight chickens.

All of the novels that Michelle Huneven are set in Southern California, frequently in Altadena, her hometown. She purchased a home in Altadena, living there until January of 2025, whereupon it was one of the casualties of the Eaton Fire and burned down. Today she resides in Echo Park with her husband and their animals.

Round Rock is a 1997 novel and the debut work from Michelle Huneven. If you have been searching for something unique to read, check out the very first book released from this author and see what you think!

Nothing ever goes according to plan, or so is claimed by the locals about a certain small town that is located in the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley. They say that it’s a great place to live, and it’s ‘just like life, only different’.

There are a number of the inhabitants of Rito that are surprised to be living in this place, all together fewer than a hundred total. There’s Red Ray as an example of this, a lawyer who has a wild problem with alcohol who decided to purchase a run down Victorian marriage with the hopes that he could get back his marriage and the affections of his wife as well as his young son back again.

It turns out to be an effort made in vain as Red destroys those hopes with one final binge. He moves on from the incident and ends up establishing Round Rock, a drunk farm, on the ruins. There he takes one day at a time and goes along with a new calling that is entirely unexpected.

Then there is Libby Daw. Months after her husband decamped for Los Angeles, she finds that she is still living alone in the trailer that they used to share together. Despite her best efforts, she is finding that she is even more tied to the valley that she is constantly dreaming of escaping.

There is also Lewis Fletcher. He is a graduate student who happens to have a sharp intelligence that is also commonly tested by his own erratic behavior and the predicament that he finds himself in. He doesn’t know why and he does not wish to do it, but he discovers that he has been placed in care of Ray at Round Rock.

As these various people look for their niches in the valley or act to maintain them, the strange history of this place also comes through. Billie Fitzgerald is an heiress who has come from the original settlers and continues to act as if she owns everything. She is devoted to her father and her son, and keeps her mercurial emotions hidden from her closest friends.

The past also comes back with David Ibanez, who has a family who for generations had harvested the groves. He also has talents and secrets, and they as well as his future are bound closely to the close knit town that they thought he had finally managed to leave behind, as he is about to find out.

Combining insight paired with artistry, the author follows along with the emerging destinies of all of these characters as they all in their own way struggle to find peace, equilibrium, happiness, and love, fighting against human frailty as well as circumstances that they often can’t control.

This book is mature and fresh and will keep the reader constantly surprised and maybe even win their heart. Grab a copy of Round Rock and get all of the details of this fictional community and landscape for yourself– you won’t want to put it down!

Jamesland is the second novel by Michelle Huneven. This witty book is a humane comedy that is all about redemption in the most unlikely of places.

Alice Black is 33 years old and has been fighting with her boyfriend. When she finds a deer in her dining room, she starts to wonder if it could be that she is going crazy. Then there’s the 46 year old Pete Ross, who knows that he’s crazy.

Pete has ruined his marriage, taken a blade to his wrists, and even spent some time in a psychiatric institution. Now he is being looked after by his mother, who is a nun. Then there’s Helen Harland, a 45 year old woman and a Unitarian Universalist minister, who is being challenged and feels she may be going crazy thanks to her hostile church administration.

The three of them live in Los Feliz, California, and end up meeting at the Wednesday midweek services conducted by Helen. Even though they seem incompatible at the start, the force of Helen’s idiosyncratic ministering combined with Alice’s ancestor William James ends up leading to friendship and even a type of transcendence.

Compassionate and generous, the author has given readers a new novel that intertwines love, faith, and some souls who are simply waiting for their life to begin. If this sounds interesting to you, check it out!