Below is the complete list of Susan Wiggs’ Family Tree books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Family Tree Books
About Family Tree
Susan Wiggs’s Family Tree sequence is a compact contemporary story built around Annie Rush, a television producer whose ambitions, relationships, and connection to her Vermont roots are explored across a short companion piece and the full-length novel Family Tree. The books are sometimes grouped under the Family Tree or Switchback, Vermont label, although Wiggs’s official bibliography classifies Family Tree among her standalone novels. The Key Ingredient is best understood as a prequel companion rather than the beginning of a larger continuing series.
The Key Ingredient goes back to an earlier stage of Annie’s life, when she is a film student pursuing a career built around her love of food and television. Her encounter with charismatic chef Martin Harlow leads to a professional partnership and the creation of a cooking program also called The Key Ingredient. When Annie and Martin travel to her hometown of Switchback, Vermont, to film a pilot episode, the experience brings her career ambitions, romantic hopes, and family background together in one place.
The short story matters primarily because it shows Annie before the successful life seen at the beginning of Family Tree. She is still building the career she wants and deciding what Martin means to her, while the Vermont setting establishes the family traditions that later become essential to her recovery. It adds context to the choices that carry Annie away from Switchback without being required to understand the main novel.
Family Tree begins much later, when Annie appears to have achieved what her younger self wanted. She is producing a successful television cooking show in Los Angeles, is married to Martin, and has created a comfortable life far removed from the family maple farm where she grew up. A devastating sequence of events abruptly destroys that stability, and Annie eventually awakens from a long coma facing profound personal loss and the difficult task of rebuilding herself.
Her return to Switchback transforms the novel from a story about professional success into one about recovery and reassessment. Annie is surrounded by family, the rhythms of the maple farm, and reminders of the person she was before television became the center of her life. Among those reminders is Fletcher Wyndham, her first love, now a judge, whose presence reconnects her with choices and possibilities she once left behind.
Food is woven throughout both works as something more meaningful than a professional interest. Annie’s passion originates with her grandmother, while cooking, recipes, television production, and the family maple-syrup business connect different periods of her life. Wiggs repeatedly uses those elements to explore inheritance in a broader sense: not simply what families own, but the habits, memories, ambitions, and emotional histories passed from one generation to another.
The structure of Family Tree also moves between Annie’s present and earlier periods of her life, allowing her relationship with Fletcher, her departure from Vermont, and the development of her career to gain meaning gradually. The contrast between past and present reinforces one of the novel’s central concerns—the difference between achieving the future someone once imagined and discovering whether that future still represents the life they want.
Taken together, The Key Ingredient and Family Tree form one continuous portrait of Annie at very different stages. The companion story captures the beginning of the ambitions and relationship that help shape her adult life, while the novel examines what remains when that carefully constructed existence collapses. Rather than functioning as a conventional multi-couple romance series, the Family Tree books are best viewed as a prequel-and-novel pairing centered on one woman’s changing understanding of love, family, work, home, and second chances.