Mikki Brammer Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Mikki Brammer
Mikki Brammer is an Australian author based in New York City. Mikki spent her childhood in Tasmania surrounded by this flock of quirky great aunts and uncles that instilled her with this passion for storytelling, adventure, and curiosity. Then she lived in several different parts of Australia, along with Spain and France.

Along with fiction, Mikki writes about art, architecture, and design for publications that include Architectural Digest, Dwell,, Metropolis, ELLE Decor Luxe Interiors + Design, and Surface.

For Mikki, writing is the chance to reflect the world back to people in such a way that she hopes helps them see its beauty and magic and also possibly understand themselves a bit better too. Stories and books have always done this for her, so she cherishes the fact that she gets the chance to do this for others. She also loves being able to live in her imagination all day long, too.

She came up with the idea for “The Collected Regrets of Clover” because from the time that she was a kid, she’d always felt this anxiety around the subject of death. A lot of this was due to the fact that no one every truly discussed it and it always felt like such a taboo subject in Western society. However she has always been somebody that does the things that she fears the most in order to conquer them, so she decided to immerse herself in it.

So she began reading books, attending seminars, ‘death cafes’, and workshops, listening to podcasts and just trying to be as curious as possible rather than continuing to avoid it like she always had in her life before that. She first learned about the idea of a death doula, and was fascinated that somebody would dedicate their whole life to just watching people die. This seemed like such a noble thing to do: to never look away from anybody’s pain, no matter what. She found this incredibly moving and she wanted to explore what would compel somebody to select that path in life, and what such a role required of them both personally and professionally. This is how Clover came about.

She began thinking about how she could write a novel which presented grief and death in such a way that was uplifting and joyful, and which would make such topics far more palatable for people like Mikki that feared them. Her goal was to use Clover’s coming-of-age journey as a sort of Trojan Horse for people to get so caught up in the story that they’d get more receptive to the questions of grief, mortality, and regret which are woven into the narrative without necessarily being all that conscious of it. And Mikki wanted to do this in a way which was optimistic and fun, instead of confronting and depressing. At the very least, she hopes readers come away from the experience inspired to do the things that they have always wanted to do before it gets to be too late.

The idea for the novel had been spinning around her mind for a couple years, but since she’d never written fiction before (she was a magazine journalist), she had not done too much on it. She finally sat down and penned the book at the start of the pandemic in New York City in April of 2020. Since all of her family was back in Australia and she was unable to head back because of border closures, and many of her friends had left the city, too, she had a bunch of time to herself.

This was a pretty strange time to be writing about death as much as she was. There were constant sirens all day and all night, and she saw some of her neighbors getting stretchered out into ambulances never to come back home. She believes during this time that there were several hundreds of people that died each day in the city from COVID. Mikki remembers riding on her bike through the empty city, passing the morgue trucks outside of the hospital, and knowing just how many people most likely died alone. This real time awareness of death as she wrote was both inspiring and confronting.

She’s not too big a fan of routine and typically, she likes writing in many different places: in libraries, in cafes, on the train, in hotel lobbies, and parks. However since she wrote her novel during lockdown, she had to find ways to create such variety in her tiny Brooklyn apartment.

She would constantly switch between her desk, her couch, and dining table (which she also used to play ping-pong against the wall during her writing breaks). Mikki would set herself a writing goal for the day and then tackle the entire thing in chunks, rewarding herself by the end of each session. These rewards would be in the form of a game of solo ping-pong, a cup of tea, or some reading time. Since she was not leaving the house too much, she wrote it far more quickly than she probably would have otherwise.

“The Collected Regrets of Clover” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2023. What is the point of giving somebody a beautiful death if you cannot give yourself a beautiful life?

From the very day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during her dramatic telling of “Peter Rabbit”, Clover Brooks has felt such a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandpa that raised her dies alone as she’s traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering folks peacefully through their end-of-life process.

Clover spends so much time with the dying that she doesn’t have any life of her own, until the last wishes of this one feisty old woman send Clover on this trip clear across the country to uncover this forgotten love story, and possibly, her own happy ending. While Clover finds herself struggling to navigate her way through the uncharted roads of friendship and romance, she’s forced to examine what she truly wants, and whether she will have the courage to even go after it.

Hopeful, clever, and probing, “The Collected Regrets of Clover” is a perfect read for fans of “Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” and “The Midnight Library” as it turns the typically taboo subject of death into a good reason to celebrate life.