Below is the complete list of Rebecca Serle books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Famous in Love Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Good Intentions Books
About Rebecca Serle
Rebecca Serle is an American novelist and television writer whose fiction blends contemporary relationships with speculative or magical premises that force characters to reconsider what they believe about love, fate, memory, and choice. A New York Times bestselling author, she began her career in young adult fiction before moving into adult novels such as The Dinner List, In Five Years, One Italian Summer, and Expiration Dates. Her stories are often marketed around an irresistible “what if?” idea, but their emotional centers tend to lie in friendship, grief, family, and the realization that knowing—or wishing for—a different future does not necessarily make life easier.
Serle studied English and creative writing at the University of Southern California and later earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School in New York City. Her first published novel, When You Were Mine, appeared in 2012. The young adult book reimagines Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Rosaline, the girl Romeo supposedly loved before Juliet. Rather than simply modernizing Shakespeare’s plot, Serle used the familiar story to examine heartbreak from the viewpoint of someone pushed to the margins of the original tragedy.
She continued writing for young adults with The Edge of Falling before creating the Famous in Love series, which follows an ordinary young woman suddenly cast in a major Hollywood film franchise. The books allowed Serle to explore celebrity, ambition, romantic complications, and the disorienting effect of entering an industry where public image can become inseparable from private identity. The series later became the Freeform television drama Famous in Love, starring Bella Thorne. Serle co-developed the adaptation and worked on the series as a writer and executive producer, giving her career an unusually direct connection between publishing and television.
Her adult fiction established the style now most strongly associated with her name. The Dinner List imagines a birthday dinner attended by five people chosen from the protagonist’s dream guest list, including Audrey Hepburn and people from her own complicated past. In Five Years begins when an ambitious lawyer experiences a startling glimpse of herself exactly five years in the future, in a life radically different from the one she has carefully planned. Beneath its romantic-looking premise, the novel is deeply concerned with friendship, loss, and the limits of controlling what comes next. Serle has described the tension between fate and free will as one of the central questions running throughout her work.
One Italian Summer approaches that concern through grief. After losing her mother, Katy travels alone to Positano and inexplicably encounters a younger version of the woman she has spent her life believing she knew completely. The magical element becomes a way of exploring the unsettling discovery that parents possessed identities, desires, and choices long before their children understood them. Expiration Dates uses another speculative device: Daphne Bell receives mysterious notes telling her exactly how long each romantic relationship will last. What initially appears to be certainty gradually becomes a question of whether allowing predictions to govern a life is simply another way of avoiding risk.
Serle’s 2026 novel Once and Again extends these interests into a multigenerational family story. The women of the Novak family each possess a one-time ability to reverse a moment in their lives, leaving protagonist Lauren to decide whether such extraordinary power is a gift or a burden. The novel brings mothers, daughters, marriage, fertility, regret, and second chances into the same conversation about control that has appeared throughout Serle’s fiction.
Across both her young adult and adult books, Serle repeatedly begins with an impossible proposition and then concentrates on very recognizable emotions. Her bibliography has evolved from modern literary reimaginings and Hollywood-centered YA into contemporary adult fiction with touches of magical realism, but the underlying questions remain remarkably consistent: which relationships define a life, how much of the future can anyone control, and what people do when reality refuses to follow the story they had planned for themselves.