Author

Elin Hilderbrand

Q: What should I read first by Elin Hilderbrand?

Start with the Nantucket series, since it is the first on file, then read it in publication order.

Elin Hilderbrand has 32 known credited books (32 published) across 4 series. Start with Nantucket.

Elin Hilderbrand is an American novelist known as the reigning voice of Nantucket fiction, having set the great majority of her nearly thirty books on the Massachusetts island where she has lived since the early 1990s. She debuted with The Beach Club in 2000 and built a career on a near-annual release schedule of ensemble, character-driven novels about family, marriage, and secrets unfolding against a single charged summer -- a rhythm that made her a fixture of the beach-read genre and earned her the nickname "Queen of the Summer Novel." Beyond her many standalones, she has built genuine linked sets: the four-book Winter Street series follows the Quinn family through consecutive Christmases, the Paradise trilogy follows the unrelated Steele family through a death that unravels a hidden second life, and four of her Nantucket-set novels share a recurring investigator, police chief Ed Kapenash. Hilderbrand announced in 2023 that she was scaling back from her long-running one-novel-a-year pace, and in 2025 published The Academy, a young-adult boarding-school novel co-written with her daughter Shelby Cunningham -- her first genre pivot and first co-writing collaboration. Her 2018 novel The Perfect Couple was adapted into a 2024 Netflix limited series starring Nicole Kidman. She has described 2024's Swan Song as her farewell to Nantucket-set adult fiction even as she continues publishing.

Series: 4
Credited books: 32
Published: 32
Latest published book: The Academy 16 September 2025
Active: 2000–present
Best known for: Nantucket

Key facts about Elin Hilderbrand

Elin Hilderbrand has 32 books on our list. 12 of them belong to a series, while 20 stand alone. Since all 32 are out now, every book here is ready to read. Their series sit on our women's fiction and young adult fiction shelves.

Elin Hilderbrand has 4 series on file. Nantucket has 4 books, while Winter Street has 4 books. Paradise has 3 books, starting in 2018.

The Academy has 1 book, starting in 2025. In particular, Nantucket is the longest series on file.

Nantucket starts with A Summer Affair, while Winter Street starts with Winter Street. Paradise starts with Winter in Paradise.

Since Nantucket is the first series on file, it is the place to start. Their first published book on file came out in 2000. Meanwhile, The Academy is the latest published book, out on 16 September 2025.

There are also 20 standalone books. You can read them in any order, since each one stands alone. The newest one that is out is The Five-Star Weekend, from 2023. The oldest on file is The Beach Club, from 2000.