Lauren Thoman Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Lauren Thoman
Lauren Thoman, after being born and raised in the suburbs in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, eventually moved with her husband to live just outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

Even though her degree was in music education, she soon realized that the life of a band director was not for her. After she explored various other fields for a number of years, she began working on her first novel once her second child began attending preschool. But these early manuscripts never made it all the way to publication, so after a few years, Lauren decided to try her hand at pop culture writing, combining her lifetime love of watching and analyzing TV shows and movies with her passion for writing.

It did not take her too long before she was a frequent contributor to numerous prominent online pop culture outlets, like POPSUGAR, Parade, Collider, Vulture, and Looper, which left little time for her to write books. For a few years, Lauren took a break from creative writing as she focused on freelancing more, enjoying this opportunity to get her writing in front of a much wider community of readers, which included The Rock, three times.

Eventually, in between article deadlines, she managed to finish another book, one which she had started years before, back in 2014, and then just set aside. That same year, she signed with her agent, Holly Root, and they tried selling several novels that she wrote which she got to the finish line but just couldn’t get them across for them to be published.

For awhile, Lauren believed that writing fiction would not be the path forward for her. But then she decided to finish the novel in 2021. She checked herself in a hotel and shut herself in a room for a week with her computer. She made enough progress on it to get back into the story. It didn’t take Lauren very long after that to complete it.

She sent it off to her agent at the start of 2022, and they sent it out to the editors in mid-March of 2022. It was “I’ll Stop the World”. And just a few months later, Mindy Kaling decided to publish it (through her Amazon imprint, Mindy’s Book Studio), much to Lauren’s delighted surprise.

She loves watching time travel flicks, but she wrote the novel after watching a ton of limited series. It is the type of storytelling which informed the way she approached the novel, and the result is a story which would not fit into just a two hour film. You would have to cut so much out that it would be just about unrecognizable. The limited series format allows for the viewer to spend more time with each and every character and move through the action of the plot. Lauren would love to see all of that interpreted for visual media.

Lauren has always been a voracious reader and loves movies and TV. Growing up, however, she rarely saw characters that looked like her. For such a long time, she clung very tightly to Claudia Kishi from “The Babysitters Club”. She is Asian and not just some stereotype. Lauren didn’t see a family that even remotely resembled hers until she became an adult.

She was reading Celeste Ng’s “Everything I Never Told You”, which was about a Chinese-American family. The mom’s white and the dad’s Chinese, and that’s what Lauren’s family looks like. Her grandparents were immigrants, and their Chinese culture was incredibly important to both of them. She had read hundreds of books and seen hundreds of TV shows and films, and Ng’s novel made her feel seen in such a way she never had before.

“I’ll Stop the World” has a diverse cast, and these different sorts of diversity very much affect who these characters are and therefore affect their own storylines, however it is not a book that is about these things. It only shows how different people from different backgrounds would navigate such a fictional situation, and Lauren loves the idea that Mindy’s imprint exists to explore this whole entire gamut of experience and also provides such an opportunity to creators from backgrounds which tend to be underrepresented in publishing.

When Lauren is not busy writing, she is probably hunting for coffee or tacos, or buried underneath a pile of dogs.

“I’ll Stop the World” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. The start and the end become one in the same in this heart pounding coming of age mystery about the power of fate, friendship, and inexplicable second chances. Is it the wrong place at the right time? Or is it the right place at the wrong time?

Justin Warren, having been trapped in a dead-end town, has had his life defined by the suspicious deaths of his grandparents. This unsolved crime happened a long time before Justin was even born, yet the ripple effects can still be felt after thirty-eight long years. Justin always knew that he would not have too much of a future, he just never imagined that his life might actually take him backwards.

In quite the cosmic twist of fate, his decisions send him crashing right into the path of Rose Yin, a determined optimist. Rose and Justin both live in the same town and even attend the same school, however have never met. Because Rose lives in the year 1985. Justin isn’t going to be born for another twenty years. His grandparents are still alive, too. For now, at least.

In a series of events which reverberate through multiple lifetimes, Rose and Justin just have a week to get Justin unstuck in time and set each of them in control of their futures, by solving this murder which hasn’t even happened yet.

This sweeping debut defies categorization. It’s a compulsively readable romance story, a multigenerational mystery, an intricately woven sci-fi, this is the mind bendy time travel eighties romp that left some readers obsessed. Whatever this book is. The novel layers one mystery atop another, from the everyday secrets in the lives of teens coming of age in a tiny town now to the dark shock waves that still radiate outward from the deaths that took place decades prior. It’s packed with twists nobody will see coming. It’s a story which resonates well after you’ve finished it.