Below is the complete list of Emily Giffin books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Adventures of Darcy Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
- The One & Only (2014)
The One & Only was first published in 2014; within the Standalone series, it is listed as book #5. 
About Emily Giffin
Emily Giffin is an American novelist best known for contemporary women’s fiction that explores friendship, marriage, family, infidelity, ambition, motherhood, and the gap between the lives people expect to have and the choices they actually make. Her breakthrough came with Something Borrowed in 2004, a novel that established her reputation for writing morally complicated relationships without reducing her characters to simple heroes and villains. She has since built a substantial body of stand-alone and loosely connected novels, including Something Blue, Baby Proof, Love the One You’re With, The One & Only, All We Ever Wanted, and The Summer Pact.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1972, Giffin grew up in Naperville, Illinois. She attended Wake Forest University before earning a law degree from the University of Virginia. After graduation, she moved to New York City and worked as a litigation attorney at Winston & Strawn. Although she had followed a conventional legal career, writing remained her stronger ambition, and she eventually left law to pursue fiction more seriously.
Giffin moved to London in the early 2000s and devoted herself to writing while working on the manuscript that became Something Borrowed. The novel follows Rachel White, a lawyer whose friendship with the charismatic Darcy Rhone is complicated when Rachel begins an affair with Darcy’s fiancé, Dex. Rather than presenting the situation as a straightforward betrayal story, Giffin focuses on friendship, resentment, self-deception, loyalty, and the compromises characters make when long-established relationships no longer fit the people they have become.
Something Blue continues the story from Darcy’s perspective, making it the clearest direct sequel in Giffin’s bibliography. The shift is significant because Darcy, initially easy to judge from Rachel’s point of view, becomes the protagonist of her own emotional reckoning. That willingness to revisit a familiar conflict from another character’s perspective became characteristic of Giffin’s interest in complicated interpersonal situations.
Her later novels expanded beyond the Rachel-and-Darcy world while retaining similar concerns. Baby Proof examines a marriage tested when spouses who once agreed not to have children discover that one has changed his mind. Love the One You’re With explores the return of an old romantic attachment after marriage, while Heart of the Matter examines a crisis involving two women whose lives intersect through one man.
Family and generational conflict became increasingly important in books such as All We Ever Wanted, where a scandal involving privileged teenagers exposes differences in parenting, class, reputation, and responsibility. The Lies That Bind places a relationship against the backdrop of New York around September 11, 2001, while Meant to Be reimagines aspects of a highly recognizable American political-family romance within a fictional framework.
Giffin’s novels are often categorized as romantic or women’s fiction, but their central conflict usually extends beyond whether two people will end up together. Friendship can be as consequential as romance, and marriage is often treated as the beginning of difficult decisions rather than the automatic conclusion of them. Her characters frequently make choices that are selfish, understandable, damaging, or compassionate at the same time.
Across her career, Giffin has developed a recognizable interest in emotional ambiguity. Her strongest stories place decent but imperfect people inside situations where loyalty to one relationship conflicts with honesty in another. That refusal to make every decision morally tidy has given her fiction its lasting identity: the drama comes not from perfect people finding perfect answers, but from adults discovering how complicated love, friendship, and family can become once real choices have consequences.