Meg Wolitzer Standalone Novels books in order

Meg Wolitzer's standalone novels span four decades of literary fiction exploring friendship, marriage, ambition, and women's lives in contemporary America.

Reading order

# Title Published Author Buy on Amazon
1 Sleepwalking 1982 Meg Wolitzer Buy
2 Caribou 1985 Meg Wolitzer Buy
3 The Dream Book 1986 Meg Wolitzer Buy
4 Hidden Pictures 1986 Meg Wolitzer Buy
5 This is Your Life aka This Is My Life 1988 Meg Wolitzer Buy
6 Friends for Life 1994 Meg Wolitzer Buy
7 Surrender, Dorothy 1999 Meg Wolitzer Buy
8 The Wife 2003 Meg Wolitzer Buy
9 The Position 2005 Meg Wolitzer Buy
10 The Ten-Year Nap 2008 Meg Wolitzer Buy
11 The Uncoupling 2011 Meg Wolitzer Buy
12 The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman 2011 Meg Wolitzer Buy
13 The Interestings 2013 Meg Wolitzer Buy
14 Belzhar 2014 Meg Wolitzer Buy
15 The Female Persuasion 2018 Meg Wolitzer Buy

Meg Wolitzer’s standalone novels span from her 1982 debut Sleepwalking through The Female Persuasion in 2018. Her early works like Caribou and Hidden Pictures established her interest in family dynamics and emotional complexity. As her career progressed, books like Surrender, Dorothy and The Position explored relationships with increasing depth and wit.

Her most acclaimed novels came in the 2000s and 2010s. The Wife is a sharp look at a literary marriage and the woman behind a famous male author. The Interestings traces a group of friends from teenage years at an arts camp through the disappointments and surprises of their adult lives. The Ten-Year Nap examines women who left careers to raise children, while The Female Persuasion follows a young woman drawn into the orbit of an older feminist activist. Her YA novel Belzhar adds a speculative element to the coming-of-age story, with students at a boarding school for emotionally fragile teens discovering that a journal-writing assignment has magical properties.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many books are in the Meg Wolitzer Standalone Novels series?

There are fifteen books in the Meg Wolitzer Standalone Novels series, published between 1982 and 2018.

What is the first book in the Meg Wolitzer Standalone Novels series?

The first book in the Meg Wolitzer Standalone Novels series is Sleepwalking, published in 1982.

What themes connect Meg Wolitzer's standalone novels?

Her novels frequently return to questions about creative ambition, the compromises people make in long-term relationships, and the gap between the lives people imagined for themselves and the ones they actually live. Gender dynamics run through nearly all of her adult fiction.

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