Abby Jimenez

Abby Jimenez is an American author known for contemporary romance novels that blend humor and heart with unusually candid attention to mental health, chronic illness and grief. Before writing full-time, she founded the Minnesota cake bakery Nadia Cakes from her home kitchen in 2007, going on to win Food Network's Cupcake Wars (2013) and appear on TLC's Fabulous Cakes. Her debut, The Friend Zone (2019), launched a trilogy that established her signature blend of laugh-out-loud comedy and unflinching emotional weight; her Part of Your World trilogy followed, including Yours Truly (2023, Book of the Month's Book of the Year) and the #1 New York Times bestseller Just for the Summer (2024), whose Alexis-and-Daniel opener pairs a big-city ER doctor with a small-town carpenter who runs his family's bed and breakfast. Her newest series, Say You'll Remember Me, launched in 2025 with a #1 bestseller of its own and continued with The Night We Met (2026). New readers should start with either The Friend Zone, her debut, or Part of Your World if they want a self-contained standalone with her now-signature small-town setting. Jimenez is known among readers for writing characters dealing with real struggles — anxiety, illness, family estrangement, caregiving — without letting those threads undercut the genre's essential warmth and humor; Life's Too Short won the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. There is no film or television adaptation of her work to date, though her rapid rise has made her a fixture of contemporary romance bestseller lists.