Cynthia

D’Aprix Sweeney

NYT Bestselling Author

Read with Jenna Book Club Pick

Travels from: New York, NY

“Dazzling . . . Funny . . . Everyone in Sweeney’s big-hearted book is given choices and those tiny, blink-or-you’ll-miss-it opportunities add up to extraordinary lives.” — Star Tribune

Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney is the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest, Good Company and her most recent novel Lake Effect. She is a Read with Jenna and Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writer’s pick, and her books have been named best of the year by People, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Amazon and others. Her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. Sweeney has been a guest on Today, Late Night with Seth Meyers, and NPR’s All Things Considered.

Prior to writing her publishing her first novel in 2016, Sweeney worked in New York City for more than twenty years as a freelance copywriter and marketing and branding consultant. She has written or directed creative copy for a number of corporations, including American Express, McDonald’s, Condé Nast, and Kellogg’s. Sweeney has served as a trustee of the Berkeley-Carroll School in Brooklyn and Razia’s Ray of Hope which provides education for young woman in Afghanistan.

In addition to her undergraduate degree from St. Bonaventure, Sweeney holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Cynthia's Featured Titles

Lake Effect: A Novel

Ecco |

March 3, 2026

Literary Fiction

“Lake Effect is utterly compelling and beautifully told. Tracing the far-reaching tremors of an affair, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney takes a familiar premise and makes it feel entirely new and original. Moving nimbly between viewpoints, she illuminates even her characters’ darkest, most regrettable moments with clarity and insight.” — Florence Knapp, The Names

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company comes a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades.

It’s 1977 and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York, a place long fueled by the booming fortunes of Kodak and Xerox and, for some, the mores of the Catholic church. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of The Joy of Sex by her newly divorced friend, she can no longer dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible—but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world, just as she stands on the threshold of adulthood.

Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down. Written with Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature humor and insight, Lake Effect is a wise and probing look at love and desire, mothers and daughters, loss and grief, and what we owe the people we love most.

Family Narratives, Fiction, Friendship & Community, Grief & Loss

Good Company: A Read with Jenna Pick

Ecco |

March 29, 2022

Literary Fiction

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick!

“Plumbs the depths of marriage, motherhood and friendship with warmth and wit. I devoured it in one gulp!” —Maria Semple

A warm, incisive new novel about the enduring bonds of marriage and friendship from Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, author of the instant New York Times bestseller The Nest

Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than twenty years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring—the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five.

Flora and Julian struggled for years, scraping together just enough acting work to raise Ruby in Manhattan and keep Julian’s small theater company—Good Company—afloat. A move to Los Angeles brought their first real career successes, a chance to breathe easier, and a reunion with Margot, now a bona fide television star. But has their new life been built on lies? What happened that summer all those years ago? And what happens now?

With Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s signature tenderness, humor, and insight, Good Company tells a bighearted story of the lifelong relationships that both wound and heal us.

A Most Anticipated Book From: OprahMag.com * Refinery29 * Houston
Chronicle * The Millions * Elle * Buzzfeed

Bestseller, Book Club & Library Favorites, Celebrity Book Club Pick, Family Narratives, Fiction, Friendship & Community

The Nest

Ecco |

March 22, 2016

Literary Fiction

Instant New York Times Bestseller; named a Best Book of 2016 by People, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Refinery29, NPR and LibraryReads.

“Hilarious and big-hearted, The Nest is a stellar debut.” — People

“Her writing is like really good dark chocolate: sharper and more bittersweet than the cheap stuff, but also too delicious not to finish in one sitting.”— Entertainment Weekly

“Humor and delightful irony abound in this lively first novel.”— New York Times Book Review

A warm, funny and acutely perceptive debut novel about four adult siblings and the fate of the shared inheritance that has shaped their choices and their lives.

Every family has its problems. But even among the most troubled, the Plumb family stands out as spectacularly dysfunctional. Years of simmering tensions finally reach a breaking point on an unseasonably cold afternoon in New York City as Melody, Beatrice, and Jack Plumb gather to confront their charismatic and reckless older brother, Leo, freshly released from rehab. Months earlier, an inebriated Leo got behind the wheel of a car with a nineteen-year-old waitress as his passenger. The ensuing accident has endangered the Plumbs’ joint trust fund, “The Nest,” which they are months away from finally receiving. Meant by their deceased father to be a modest mid-life supplement, the Plumb siblings have watched The Nest’s value soar along with the stock market and have been counting on the money to solve a number of self-inflicted problems.

Melody, a wife and mother in an upscale suburb, has an unwieldy mortgage and looming college tuition for her twin teenage daughters. Jack, an antiques dealer, has secretly borrowed against the beach cottage he shares with his husband, Walker, to keep his store open. And Bea, a once-promising short-story writer, just can’t seem to finish her overdue novel. Can Leo rescue his siblings and, by extension, the people they love? Or will everyone need to reimagine the futures they’ve envisioned? Brought together as never before, Leo, Melody, Jack, and Beatrice must grapple with old resentments, present-day truths, and the significant emotional and financial toll of the accident, as well as finally acknowledge the choices they have made in their own lives.

This is a story about the power of family, the possibilities of friendship, the ways we depend upon one another and the ways we let one another down. In this tender, entertaining, and deftly written debut, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney brings a remarkable cast of characters to life to illuminate what money does to relationships, what happens to our ambitions over the course of time, and the fraught yet unbreakable ties we share with those we love.

Bestseller, Family Narratives, Fiction, Friendship & Community

My Overnight Success: Publishing a Bestselling Debut Novel at 55

This talk centers on all the obstacles that prevented me (and many others!) from pursuing fiction—from imposter syndrome to fear of failure to not understanding that you need to tolerate writing poorly before you get to the good stuff—through the lens of my experience which was long, frustrating, sometimes funny and ultimately successful. Although “success” is not always exactly what you expect it to be!

Your First Five Pages

The opening pages of a short story or novel are crucial to keeping the reader engaged and to setting up your work in a way that signals what the reader should expect. Focusing on tone, imagery, characterization and voice, I use specific examples from varying writers to demonstrate how to start a work so the reader keeps reading.

How Do I Make My Characters Sound Real?

Spoiler alert: It’s not by copying the way we speak in life! Dialogue is often the heart and soul of a book. Writing dialogue that feels “real” is harder than it may seem. In an interactive setting, I demonstrate various methods to getting dialogue not only sounding authentic but working for the writer in a multitude of ways to both advance plot and develop character.

“Dazzling . . . Funny . . . Everyone in Sweeney’s big-hearted book is given choices and those tiny, blink-or-you’ll-miss-it opportunities add up to extraordinary lives.” — Star Tribune

“Astute and immersive with a surprising twist.” — People

“An insightful, beautiful tearjerker of a book.” — Real Simple

“Sharply observed.” — Boston Globe

“This is basically Anne Tyler with better sex. . . . . Sweeney carries off something immensely difficult and heartening — a braiding of hurt and forgiveness, sadness and love, that feels strong enough to last.” — Ron Charles, Substack

“A propulsive read that covers everything from intimacy to family dynamics and trust, Lake Effect is a zip of a book.” — Marie Claire

“Lake Effect opens in 1977, Rochester, which is so precise you could almost smell it . . . if you like a big, messy family story—this is definitely a book for you.” — New York Times Book Review

“Satisfying. . . . Sweeney captures the zeitgeist of the ‘70s with key passages in cultural history: along with the divorce spike of those years, the plot weaves in the research at Xerox that ultimately led to the personal computer, the early days of cable food shows, the beginnings of the AIDS epidemic, the way people could disappear in a time before email and smartphones and social media, and more. . . . .Sweeney’s insight into all the ways people who love each other end up at bitter odds gives the warm-hearted novel a welcome bite. An inviting family drama with the warmth, interest, and edge readers love in Sweeney’s work.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“I absolutely love this book. It is perfection.” — Sarah Gelman, CBS Mornings

“A story of desire, jealousy, fragile family bonds, and choices both freeing and haunting, this is a gift from Sweeney.” — Library Journal (starred review)

“A reverberating, intergenerational family saga . . . Artful [and] fresh.” — Booklist (starred)

“Sweeney excels at exploring how the characters are shaped over time by their complex family dynamics. (As Clara’s new boyfriend puts it: ‘People change. We change. Sometimes for the better.’) The author’s fans will enjoy this.” — Publishers Weekly

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