Jessica Soffer Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Jessica Soffer is an American published author.

She is known for her novels Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots and This Is a Life Story. She grew up living in New York City. She attended Hunter College, where she earned her MFA and was a Hertog Fellow.

She has had her work featured in such places as The New York Times, Saveur, Real Simple, Granta, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.

Jessica teaches creative writing to small groups and in the corporate space. She resides in Sag Harbor, New York, with her family.

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a 2013 novel from Jessica Soffer. This is the story about choosing to accept the people that we love. These include the people that we have to love and those that we choose to love, as well as the families that we make and the families that we are given.

This is the story of two women who are adrift in New York. They are a widow and nearly an orphan, and each of them is looking for someone that she has lost. It is a story of how there are joys that are waiting close by, even in times of grief or darkness.

Lorca spends a lot of her time to the point where it has become her life looking at cookbooks, making creations like hot chocolate and croissants, looking for rare ingredients, all so that she can ultimately earn the love of her mother, who is a distracted chef who is also packing her off and sending her off to boarding school.

Lorca makes one last effort to prove that she is indispensable. She makes a promise to herself to try and track down the recipe for what her mother would see as the perfect meal, an obscure dish from the Middle East that is called ‘masgouf’.

Then there’s Victoria, who is struggling with the death of her husband. She has been constantly dreaming of the daughter that the couple gave up forty years ago. Victoria is an Iraqi Jewish immigrant who previously used to run a restaurant. When she begins to start offering cooking lessons, Lorca immediately signs up.

Together the two of them bake everything, Victoria teaching Lorca how to make baklava, pistachio cookies, and kubba with squash. They start to suspect that they may have more of a connection between the two of them than just their love of food.

Soon they are going to have to deal with not only the past but the future and the truth– whatever that might appear to be. There is an Arabic saying that goes ‘bukra film mish mish’, which means that tomorrow, apricots may bloom. Will Lorca ultimately find what she is looking for, or have to learn to accept her disappointment? Read this food-infused novel from Jessica Soffer to find out!

This Is a Life Story is a 2025 novel. It is a celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices that we frequently make for both of them. If you are looking for a unique and fresh fictional story to enjoy, be sure to give this book a try.

For the past fifty years, Jane and Abe have been making their way to Central Park. They came there as young lovers with stars in their eyes, as parents who were equally parts frustrated and exhausted, and as artists that were looking at their careers and watching them take off.

Jane and Abe would come to the park alone when they felt that they needed some time away from the other, and they would go to it together whenever they had something important that they needed to discuss. For nearly half of a century of their love story, Central Park had been witness to all of those important moments. But now everything is on the verge of changing for good.

Jane is dying. Abe is going over their life together as a kind of way to keep them both going. He’s recounting the parts that they knew from their courtship, their early marriage, and their growing creative lives. He’s also recounting the parts that they did not always care to know.

This includes a young student of Abe’s that is looking for her own love story as well as their son Max, who has the impression that his mother chose to pursue art over being a parent, and who has also taken great lengths to avoid love and intimacy.

Told from different points of view, there are different voices coming in and out to make a portrait that could ultimately end up being as essential and complicated as love itself. Beautiful and lyrically written, be sure to grab a copy of This Is a Life Story by Jessica Soffer to absorb all of this story and be swept away from start to finish!