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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.

Merry-Go-Round Man is coming Oct. 1!

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.