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I write contemporary adult and YA fiction that explores real life in all its complexity—always with a generous helping of humor. Praised by Library Journal for writing with “intelligence and subtlety,” my stories capture the authentic, dramatic, and often laugh-out-loud dynamics of family, relationships, and human connection.

My motto is: If you’re not clutching that tissue box, busting out laughing, and humming “Aww!”, I haven’t done my job.

Across the Universe is coming November 9!

Twelve years ago, they shared one magical moonlit night.

Then Babs disappeared.

Twelve years later, they collide like stars.

Babs has come to Switzerland with one goal: save the faltering walking-tour business she’s poured her heart into. Her plans do not include chasing a young sandwich thief through a picturesque Swiss village—and running straight into Will Barone, the man she’s never quite forgotten.

Will was once an astronomy student with dreams as wide as space. Now he’s a widowed father running a café and museum, hoping to buy the property from its retiring owner and pay for his daughter’s boarding school—a last-ditch attempt to rein in his increasingly risk-taking child.

And Babs orbiting back into his life? That stirs up every feeling he thought he’d left behind for the fairy-dust girl he awakened to find gone, leaving him with nothing but yearning—and that hysterical faux glass slipper.

As they bid for the same café/museum property, Babs and Will should be adversaries. And they are—until a third bid from Babs’s longtime archnemesis and the café/museum owner’s slimy son convinces them that teaming up is their only hope of winning—and protecting everything they’ve worked for.

It takes a freak Thanksgiving snowstorm and a cozy cottage with only one bed to make them wonder whether there’s room in their carefully laid plans for more.

But when the storm clears, will the gravity pulling them together be strong enough to keep their worlds from spinning apart?

Merry-Go-Round Man is available now!

Fern Moretti has always known where she’s going next—and she’s always going somewhere next. Until now.

At forty-something, Fern has built a life around work, travel, and never staying in one place long enough to get too comfortable. But when her next international assignment suddenly stalls, she finds herself back home in Alameda, California, with her eight-year-old daughter, her big Italian family, and a mother who is far too interested in what Fern’s astrological chart has to say about her love life.

Then there’s Marco Patris.

Handsome, charming, ridiculously orderly, and firmly planted in Alameda, Marco is everything globe-trotting Fern isn’t. He likes his life—and apparently his house—just so. He’s comfortably set in his ways. Fern is always planning where she’ll go next. Yet from the moment they meet, she feels a pull to stay she can’t quite explain.

Funny, romantic, and full of Italian-family chaos, Merry-Go-Round Man is a forty-something romance about fated mates, astrology, Tarot, Sicilian witchy traditions—and discovering that sometimes love really is written in the stars.

Spinning Into Gold is available now!

Filled with laugh-out-loud banter, unforgettable friendships, swoony romance, and hard-won hope, Spinning Into Gold is a heartfelt love story of unimagined paths—and discovering that sometimes the best dreams are the ones you never saw coming.

“A heartfelt coming-of-age romance about learning that life rarely follows the plans we make for it… With witty banter, swoony romance, unforgettable friendships, and genuine emotional depth, Michelene Esposito beautifully captures the uncertainty of growing up and the courage it takes to embrace an unexpected path.”
—NewInBooks.com

Mermaid is available now!

They were the girls who didn’t drown.

In 1983, seven-year-old May and her older sister, Kate, sat in the back of their mother’s car watching the murky churn and roil of the San Francisco Bay. And then they were in its freezing depths. They were the “poor motherless girls” who made it—swimming up and out of the water to become survivors, forever defined by their mother’s inconceivable act.

And as they grow, the ripples of that day become a tide. May is a woman quietly haunted, clinging to a life of safe, solid ground. Kate has become a storm—volatile, self-destructive, and then…missing.

As May searches for her sister, she must confront the wreckage of their shared childhood and the hidden truth of her mother’s final act.

Lyrical, raw, joyfully wry, and achingly sad, Mermaid explores the resilience of the sisterly bond, what it means to decide to live, and the courage it takes to forgive those who could not stay.