Daisy Alpert Florin Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Daisy Alpert Florin is a literary fiction author who is best known for her debut novel “My Last Innocent Year.”

The author went to Dartmouth College and got graduate degrees from Bank Street Graduate School of Education and Columbia University.

She would then become a fellow at the Sarah Larence College’s Kathryn Gurfein Writing Fellowship in addition to a novel revision fellowship at Bookends.
Over the years, she has been penning essays that have been published in the likes of “Motherwell” and “Lithub” among several others.

She published “My Last Innocent Year” her debut novel in 2023 and this would make her name in the literary fiction world.

The novel got a lot of buzz and would be named a Must-Read Book by USA Today and an Editors Choice by the New York Times Review.

The work tells the story of Isabel the protagonist who is completing her final semester inspired by the author’s days at Dartmouth College.

The beautiful and atmospheric novel which is set in the 1990s against the Lewinsky/Clinton scandal is a smart novel examining how we reckon with our pasts, the cost of our mistakes, and consent.
While she was born in New York, she currently makes her home in Connecticut, where she lives with her family.

As for her childhood, Daisy Alpert Florin was brought up in a mixed-faith family as her father was Jewish and her mother was not and as such, she grew up without religion.

However, she always felt culturally Jewish given that she was from New York and this made her feel very different from her peers at Dartmouth.

Daisy had always felt that she needed to put down her unique feelings on paper but for several years, all she did was write personal years. After getting several of her essays published she thought it was time she penned long-form fiction.
She started writing down the many stories from college, particularly the last few years during which she was on the precipice of childhood and adulthood.

She asked herself if she was ready to leave childhood and step into the many and difficult responsibilities of adulthood. Daisy dove into the last semester of college which she attended during the 90s and started making it into a novel.
Daisy would explore many of the issues she had been thinking about during the time but these were not things that necessarily happened to her.

Daisy Alpert Florin has often said that her path toward publication was pretty much straightforward as she managed to snag an agent a few weeks after she was done writing and it was not long before the manuscript was sold.
Still, beneath all that were years of self-doubt as she had spent many years just dabbling before she began writing in her late thirties. She published her novel just when she was about to turn 50.
Before she became a published author she used to feel like a loser, floundering in her work and life. It took a very long time for Daisy to think of herself as an author and she never realized that she had been one all along.
She would then give herself permission to go after what she thought was a crazy dream.

During this time, she was a stay-at-home mother making practically no income, taking care of three children, and spending all her time working on her manuscript.

She believes that the reason why her publication process was so easy was that she held onto her manuscript for as long as she could. When she finally submitted it it was very ready.

Daisy Alpert Florin’s novel “My Last Innocent Year” is a work that is set in the winter of 1998. The lead of the novel is a young woman named Isabel Rosen who is a senior at a prestigious school in Wilder Colege doing her final semester.
It is a college with an elite and wealthy student body and a picturesque environment you only see in college brochures. Rosen had always felt out of place at the college since she was born the daughter of a store owner from the Lower East Side.
Things had not been made any easier by the untimely death of her mother a few weeks after she joined the college, as it had left her feeling unanchored.

But she had slowly come to believe she had found a place she could feel comfortable, only to be left reeling following a non-consensual sexual incident with the only other Jewish student in the college.
Enter once-famous poet R.H. Connelly who is her professor who also happens to be married. He makes her feel talented, beautiful, and seen as just the woman she always wanted to be.

His attention ignites a belief in herself and they soon embark on an affair that threatens everything she thinks she stands for.

It is a brilliant coming-of-age story of a young woman on the edge of artistic and sexual awakening who has to navigate her way toward independence while acknowledging her grit, beauty, and power of where she is coming from.