Sarina Bowen

Sarina Bowen writes contemporary romance with an unusually clear-eyed sense of how adults actually build a life, a trait that traces back to her own pre-writing career. A Yale economics graduate who spent twelve years as a derivatives trader on Wall Street, alongside stints as a waiter, an assistant home appraiser and a food writer, Bowen brings real texture to work, ambition and money that a lot of romance skips past, all filtered through a New Englander's eye for small-town and campus settings. She made her name with The Ivy Years, a New Adult series set among students and misfits at a fictional Ivy League school, opening with The Year We Fell Down, a quietly emotional romance between a hockey player and a wheelchair-using former figure skater that helped define disability representation in the genre at its commercial peak. A supporting Ivy Years character, hockey player Adam Hartley, later headlines Rookie Move, the first book of her Brooklyn Bruisers trilogy, which follows a fictional NHL expansion team through one season with the same insider authenticity and swoony commitment Bowen is known for. New readers can start with either series, The Year We Fell Down for campus romance, Rookie Move for professional sports romance, since each book stands alone. Bowen has continued expanding the Brooklyn hockey world in several further series since.