Elena Meets the Author

It’s Christmas Eve in Mamaroneck, New York. Ninety-six-year-old Graziella has prepared the Feast of the Seven Fishes, as she does every year, for her daughter Grace and her granddaughter Ella. But Ella, a twenty-something idealist vegan, refuses to eat a bite. So the outspoken four foot two nonna serves her granddaughter a can of cat food instead. Ella throws the tin at a life-size plaster baby Je...

Eileen O’Malley’s brother Lenny is killed in Vietnam while she’s a sophomore in college. Overnight her life changes. She drops out, moves home to Charleston, and takes a job in the men’s department of a local shop to help pay the bills. Then a handsome naval officer asks her advice about a pair of trousers. Next thing she knows, she’s a young bride on La Maddalena, a small Mediterranean island off...

Priya Parmar’s The Original covers eighteen years of Katharine Hepburn’s life, from the age of 13, the year her brother Tom died, to the age of 32. Not the icon in the polo neck, but the young woman before all that. The failures, the self-invention, the loss she never really recovered from. It’s been praised by The New York Times, The Independent, BBC Radio, People and Oprah. In this episode of El...

Alan Anderson is a visionary ad man. That is, up until the morning he isn’t. He blows the biggest account of his career, comes apart, and moves out to live off the land, the land being his backyard in suburban Greenwich, Connecticut. He sets up in the children’s playhouse. He goes barefoot. He uses the woods as a bathroom. His timing couldn’t be worse. His wife Vivian is in the middle of a campaig...

Twenty-two rib eye steaks go missing from Aunt Orsa’s, an upscale Italian restaurant in a fictional Midwestern college town. They vanish on the same day that celebrity author John Grisham is due to dine there. Someone on the staff took them. But who? That’s the whodunit. What Rebecca Kauffman’s sixth novel actually is, is something deeper and more complex than that. A who are they? The table of co...

John Lanchester, Booker Prize-nominated author and regular contributor to The New Yorker, is my latest guest on Elena Meets the Author, the literary podcast that goes behind the book and into the mind of the author. His latest novel Look What You Made Me Do is full of twists and turns, so pay attention. Two women, both Londoners from different generations. Kate, 57, recently widowed, quietly devas...

Annabel Monaghan is a return guest on Elena Meets the Author, and for good reason. The internet has crowned her the queen of the summer romance, and as one fan put it, it’s not summer until Annabel Monaghan has come out with a book. Her latest, Dolly All the Time, is a number one New York Times bestseller and a Good Morning America book club pick. It’s the story of Dolly Brick, a single mum, a cha...

Ayelet Waldman’s latest novel is unlike anything else out there right now. A Perfect Hand is set in Victorian England and it’s a marriage plot with a twist. Alice Lockey, a lady’s maid, has fallen for Charlie Wells, a lord’s valet. The only way these two servants can be together is if Alice’s Lady Jemima falls for Charlie’s Lord Wynstowe. Which would be straightforward enough, except the lord and...

Three close friends. One dark secret they are each ashamed of. And a series of murders they are uniquely qualified to solve. The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives by Elizabeth Arnott is set during a sweltering summer in Los Angeles in 1966. Young women are being killed. And the three women investigating the crimes, Margot, Elsie, and Beverly, have something in common that gives them an edge: all th...

Five is not like any other novel I’ve read. It’s a fast-paced, urgent, entertaining psychological thriller with fascinating flawed characters. Funny at times, sad at others, thoughtful and surprising throughout. Here’s the premise: Five strangers are waiting on a suburban London train platform. In five minutes, one of them will be hit by an oncoming train and die. They don’t know this. But you do....

Mary Kay Ash built a $2 billion cosmetics empire out of a 500 square foot Dallas storefront. She was the first woman ever to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman included in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time, a pantheon otherwise reserved for Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie. And when CBS This Morning introduced Mary Kay to America, they declared there was n...

A grieving young widow receives a phone call on her birthday. Her husband, Joe, died five months earlier. But before he did, he arranged something extraordinary: a year’s worth of books, one for every month, chosen to help her move on with her life. That’s the premise of Libby Page’s latest novel, This Book Made Me Think of You, a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and USA Today bestseller, and the book I...

Today I’m speaking with Grant Ginder about his latest novel, So Old, So Young. I feel like I really get millennials and their anxiety-driven yet somehow still hopeful character. The book follows six college friends across five parties and twenty years. A New Year’s Eve, a wedding, a birthday, a kids’ Halloween, and a funeral. From a night where everything felt possible to a morning where they had...

What do Taylor Swift, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna and a teenage girl from Pittsburgh in 1900 all have in common? More than you’d think. In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m talking to New York Times bestselling author Allison Pataki about her eleventh book, It Girl , a gripping, fast-paced historical novel inspired by the true story of Evelyn Nesbit, America’s very first influencer. But this...

It all starts with a squabble over an apple cake. When one sister bakes a much better cake than the other, the estrangement that follows ripples across three generations of the Rubinstein family for years. In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m talking with New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman about her latest novel, This Is Not About Us , a national bestseller and a Late Show...

Today I am speaking to Jason Rosenthal, whose memoir, My Wife Said You May Want to Marry Me , is a story of true love, true loss, and how to truly live again after that loss. It all began with an extraordinary essay written by Jason’s wife, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, a prolific author, public speaker, and filmmaker. In 2017, Amy wrote a piece for the New York Times Modern Love column titled You May Wan...

In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I speak with critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and Amazon bestselling author Robert Dugoni, whose books have sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, primarily across his police, espionage, and legal thriller series. Today we focus on Robert’s standalone literary novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, publis...

Today I’m speaking to the remarkable author and journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland, whose nonfiction book A Flower Traveled in My Blood reads like a novel, but is entirely true. Haley’s book - which The New York Times and The Washington Post among others named one of the best books of 2025 - tells the story of the Argentine grandmothers who fought to find a stolen generation of grandchildren. Haley’...

Today, I’m speaking to Brigitte Dale about her debut novel, The Good Daughters. It is a powerful, beautifully written story that takes us back to early 20th-century England, when women from all social classes united to fight for the right to vote. Brigitte’s suspenseful and fast-paced novel weaves historical fact with gripping fiction, centring on four young suffragettes from vastly different back...

In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m joined by the talented Samantha Greene Woodruff to talk about her gripping historical novel The Trade-Off. Set against the backdrop of the 1929 Wall Street crash, the novel follows Bea Abramovitz, a mathematically gifted and young jewish woman who foresees the financial collapse but struggles to be taken seriously in a world dominated by men. We explo...

In this new episode of Elena Meets the Author , I’m joined by debut American novelist Emily Everett to talk about her novel All That Life Can Afford . We talk about how Emily’s own experiences shaped the story, and explore themes of social class, ambition, friendship, and belonging. We also discuss the influence of Pride and Prejudice on the novel, and what it was like for Emily to write while bal...

In this special holiday episode of Elena Meets the Author , I’m joined by Lisa Scully, the owner of the wonderful Locust Valley Bookstore on Long Island. Lisa shares her journey into independent bookstore ownership and speaks openly about the challenges and rewards of running a local bookshop today. We talk about competing with Amazon, the importance of community support, and what keeps independen...

New episode out now! In episode 37 of Elena Meets the Author , I speak with award-winning journalist and debut biographer Chris Sweeney about his fascinating new book, The Feather Detective: Mystery, Mayhem, and the Magnificent Life of Roxie Laybourne . Chris’s book introduced me to a woman I had never heard of but now can’t stop thinking about: Roxie Collie Laybourne , the trailblazing scientist...

In this episode of Elena Meets the Author , I talk to the brilliant and bestselling author Fiona Davis about her new novel The Stolen Queen , a dual-timeline mystery that moves between 1936 Egypt and 1978 New York City . Fiona shares the real inspirations behind the story (thank you Kim Kardashian), as well as her fascination with antiquities and the stories behind them. She looks at the ways hist...

In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I had such a fun and fascinating chat with Katie Yee , the debut author of Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. Her novel has been compared to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn , it’s witty, warm, and full of heart, finding humour even in the hardest moments. We talk about where the story came from, how Katie created her wonderfully observant narrator, an...