Matthew Quick
Matthew Quick has published 10 books across 2 series. The recommended reading order starts with Sorta Like a Rock Star (2011).
Matthew Quick is an American novelist who writes for both adults and young adults, building stories that refuse easy answers and find hope in difficult places. He made his debut in 2008 with The Silver Linings Playbook, a novel that became an Oscar-winning film and established him as a writer drawn to characters navigating pain and possibility in equal measure. The book launched a career that has reached readers in more than thirty languages and made him a number one bestseller in Brazil.
Quick studied English literature and secondary education at La Salle University, then earned his MFA from Goddard College. He taught for several years before leaving the classroom to write full-time, a shift that has produced nine novels to date. His recent novel We Are the Light earned a number one Indie Next Pick and a Book of the Month selection. His work has been recognized with a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, named a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and nominated for the Deutscher Jugendliteratur Preis. The Hollywood Reporter named him one of Hollywood's 25 Most Powerful Authors.
Quick lives in Beaufort, South Carolina, with his wife, novelist Alicia Bessette.
Shelf & Shadows
Order of Anthologies
- Tagsyoung-adultnon-fictionDescriptionThis anthology dares you to question the boundaries we've been taught to respect, the lines we've been told never to cross. Matthew Quick, known for his fearless exploration of human vulnerability and resilience, curates a collection that challenges convention at every turn. The stories here refuse to play it safe, instead pushing against the comfortable narratives we tell ourselves about who we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to live. Each piece interrogates a different kind of rule—social, personal, artistic—and asks what might happen if we simply stopped obeying. The voices gathered here span genres and sensibilities, but they share a common thread of defiance tempered with wisdom. These aren't tales of reckless rebellion for its own sake, but rather thoughtful examinations of when breaking the rules becomes the only honest choice. The writing crackles with the energy of writers who understand that sometimes the most radical act is simply telling the truth. What makes this collection essential is its refusal to offer easy answers or comfortable resolutions. Quick has assembled work that trusts readers to sit with complexity, to embrace the messy reality that sometimes the right path forward means abandoning the map entirely. For anyone who's ever felt constrained by expectation or exhausted by conformity, these stories offer both permission and provocation.Publication dateSeptember 1, 2013Amazon rating4.6/5Print length222LanguageEnglishPublisherChicago Review Press
Order of Standalone Novels
- Tagsyoung-adultDescriptionSome people shine even when the world tries to dim them. Amber Appleton is one of those people. She lives on a school bus with her mom and their dog, but she refuses to let that define her. She's determined to spread joy wherever she goes. Amber volunteers at a nursing home. She teaches English to Korean women at her church. She plays guitar for a crew of Vietnam vets. She's the kind of person who makes everyone around her feel a little more alive. Her optimism is fierce, almost defiant. But optimism has limits. When tragedy strikes, Amber's carefully constructed world shatters. The grief is overwhelming. The darkness she's been outrunning finally catches up, and she has to face the fact that positivity alone can't fix everything. She stops going to school. She stops seeing her friends. She stops being Amber. This is a story about what happens when hope breaks. It's also about what happens after. Matthew Quick writes with raw honesty about homelessness, loss, and the messy work of healing. Amber's voice is unforgettable—funny, heartbreaking, and utterly real. This isn't a book that ties everything up neatly. It's a book that understands how hard it is to keep going when life knocks you down, and how much we need each other to find our way back.Publication dateMay 3, 2011Amazon rating4.4/5Print length384LanguageEnglishPublisherLittle, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Tagsliterary-fictionmysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionPat Peoples is counting down the days until his separation from his wife Nikki ends, convinced that if he improves himself enough—losing weight, reading the books she taught in her English class, controlling his temper—she will take him back. He doesn't talk about the bad thing that happened, the thing that landed him in a neural health facility for four years, but he's determined to focus on the silver linings, to be the man Nikki deserves. What makes this novel remarkable is its voice—Pat narrates with a guileless, almost childlike optimism that gradually reveals the fractures beneath his carefully maintained worldview. He lives with his parents now, watches football with his father in tense silence, and tries to make sense of a world that has moved on without him while he was away. Then he meets Tiffany, a young widow as damaged and unmoored as he is, and she offers him a deal: she'll help him reconnect with Nikki if he'll be her partner in a dance competition. It's an absurd arrangement, and Pat knows it, but he's desperate enough to agree. Matthew Quick has crafted something tender and unsettling here, a story about mental illness and delusion and the strange, stubborn ways we try to rebuild ourselves after everything falls apart. The silver linings Pat searches for are real, but they're not always where he expects to find them.Publication dateOctober 16, 2012Amazon rating4.4/5Print length304LanguageEnglishPublisherSarah Crichton Books
- Tagsyoung-adultchildrenDescriptionBasketball becomes both refuge and lifeline in a hardscrabble town where dreams feel like luxuries most people can't afford. The court is where Finley finds clarity, where the noise of his struggling neighborhood fades into the rhythm of the game, where he can focus on getting his girlfriend Erin out of this place and into a better future. Then a boy named Russell arrives, though he insists on being called Boy21, claiming he's from outer space and waiting for his parents to return from the stars. The truth is darker and more human—his parents were murdered, and the delusion is how he survives the grief. Finley's coach asks him to befriend this broken, brilliant player, to help him find his way back to basketball, back to earth, back to himself. What unfolds is a quiet, aching story about two boys navigating loss and loyalty in a world that doesn't make room for softness. Finley must balance his own fragile hopes with the weight of someone else's trauma, all while the violence and desperation of their town press in from every side. Matthew Quick writes with restraint and tenderness, crafting a novel that understands how sports can be both escape and expression, how friendship can ask everything of us, and how sometimes the only way forward is to hold on to each other when the ground gives way.Publication dateJune 18, 2013Amazon rating4.5/5Print length272LanguageEnglishPublisherLittle, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Tagsyoung-adultchildrenDescriptionLeonard Peacock wakes up on his eighteenth birthday with a plan: he'll deliver four goodbye gifts to the people who mattered, then he'll kill his former best friend, and then himself. He's carrying his grandfather's P-38 pistol in his backpack, moving through his high school day with the weight of finality pressing on every interaction. The gifts are carefully chosen—a Bogart humphrey figurine, a mix CD, a letter, vintage vinyl—tokens for the few souls who showed him kindness in a world that mostly looked away. What unfolds isn't a thriller but something quieter and more devastating: a portrait of a boy so isolated, so damaged by what happened between him and Asher Beal, that oblivion feels like the only reasonable option. Quick writes Leonard's voice with dark humor and raw vulnerability, letting us see the intelligence and tenderness beneath the suicidal ideation. There's Herr Silverman, the teacher who notices. There's the Holocaust survivor neighbor. There's the slow reveal of why Leonard's rage has this particular target. This is a book about the kids we miss, the violence we don't name, and whether one person's attention can be enough to pull someone back from the edge. It's uncomfortable and necessary, written with the kind of empathy that doesn't flinch from the hardest questions. Quick trusts his readers—and Leonard—enough to sit in the dark before searching for light.Publication dateJuly 1, 2014Amazon rating4.2/5Print length304LanguageEnglishPublisherLittle, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Tagsliterary-fictionmysteryDescriptionThirty-eight years old. That's how long Bartholomew Neil has lived under his mother's care. When she dies, he's left alone for the first time in his life, unmoored and uncertain how to navigate a world he's never had to face on his own. Then he finds it. A letter tucked in his mother's underwear drawer. The discovery sets him on an unexpected path: writing deeply personal, confessional letters to Richard Gere. Yes, that Richard Gere. The actor becomes Bartholomew's confessor, his imagined confidant in a life suddenly stripped of its only anchor. What follows is a quest. Bartholomew needs to understand where he fits, who he is without his mother's presence defining every day. The letters pour out, raw and intimate, as he searches for belonging in a world that has always felt just slightly out of reach. Matthew Quick crafts a story about loneliness and connection, about the strange ways we reach out when we're lost. Bartholomew's voice is singular—vulnerable, earnest, and oddly hopeful. This is a novel about finding your people in the most unlikely places, about the courage it takes to start over when you thought your life was already written. It's tender without being precious, quirky without losing its emotional weight. A story that understands how hard it is to be human.Publication dateJanuary 13, 2015Amazon rating4/5Print length304LanguageEnglishPublisherHarperPb
- Tags---DescriptionMatthew Quick understands something essential about salvation: you can't find it alone. Love May Fail is a novel about broken people reaching for each other in the dark, and it glows with a stubborn, defiant warmth. Portia Kane flees her Florida mansion and her pornographer husband, landing back in South Jersey with nothing but a wild idea. She'll track down Mr. Vernon, the high school English teacher who once made her believe in goodness, and she'll rescue him from whatever darkness sent him into early retirement. It's a quest born of desperation. The kind you embark on when you need to prove the world isn't entirely rotten. South Jersey hasn't changed much—still gritty, still unforgiving—but Portia assembles an unlikely crew: a sharp-tongued nun, a recovering addict, a metal-obsessed kid, her hoarder mother. They're all damaged. They're all trying. Quick writes with compassion that never tips into sentimentality. His characters are messy, flawed, achingly real. This is a story about whether kindness can survive trauma, whether one person's faith in another can spark something like redemption. It doesn't offer easy answers. But it insists, with quiet ferocity, that trying matters. That showing up for each other—even when you're barely holding yourself together—might be the most radical act of all.Publication dateJune 21, 2016Amazon rating4/5Print length416LanguageEnglishPublisherHarper Paperbacks
- Tagsyoung-adultchildrenDescriptionNanette O'Hare has been playing the part of the perfect girl for so long she's almost forgotten there's anyone else underneath—star student, star athlete, the kind of daughter who checks every box. Then her favorite teacher slips her a battered copy of a cult novel no one's heard of anymore, and something cracks wide open. The book speaks to a version of herself she didn't know existed, the one who's tired of performing, who wants to scream and break things and finally be real. So she tracks down the reclusive author, and what starts as curiosity becomes a kind of salvation—or so she thinks. Nanette throws herself into rebellion with the same intensity she once brought to being perfect, shedding her old life like a skin that never fit. But Quick doesn't let her off easy, and neither does the world. This is a story about what happens when you finally find your true self and discover it's messier, more painful, and far more complicated than you imagined. It's about the cost of authenticity, the seduction of reinvention, and the hard truth that sometimes the people we idolize are just as lost as we are. Sharp, aching, and unflinching, it's a coming-of-age novel that refuses to offer easy answers.Publication dateApril 4, 2017Amazon rating4.2/5Print length288LanguageEnglishPublisherLittle, Brown Books for Young Readers
- Tagsliterary-fictionmysterysuspensethrillerDescriptionMatthew Quick has written a novel that refuses to let you look away, a portrait of American anger and unexpected grace that crackles with the electricity of a man at war with himself and everyone around him. The Reason You're Alive introduces us to David Granger, a Vietnam veteran whose unfiltered rage and politically incorrect tirades mask something far more complicated than the curmudgeon he appears to be—this is a book that lives in the uncomfortable space between fury and tenderness, where the wounds of war never quite heal and the present feels like hostile territory. When a medical crisis forces David to confront his mortality, the novel becomes a reckoning with everything he's buried: his time in the jungle, his fractured relationship with his son, and the ghosts that have haunted him across decades. Quick writes with a fearless empathy that never excuses David's worst impulses but insists we understand where they come from, crafting a narrative that moves from caustic humor to genuine heartbreak without missing a beat. This is a story about what we owe each other across the divides of generation, politics, and trauma—a book that asks whether redemption is possible for those who've seen too much and said too little about what really matters.Publication dateJune 26, 2018Amazon rating4.3/5Print length240LanguageEnglishPublisherHarper Paperbacks
- Tagsliterary-fictionDescriptionA man writes letters to a late-night talk show host he's never met, convinced they're best friends. That's how Lucas Goodgame begins to process the unthinkable: his wife Darcy died in a mass shooting at their local movie theater, and he can't remember anything from that night. The letters pour out—raw, confused, heartbreaking—addressed to someone Lucas believes will understand. But it's the people in his small town who actually show up: a teenage boy obsessed with monsters, a group of elderly women who refuse to let him disappear into grief, his neighbors who've carried their own quiet tragedies for years. They're all broken in different ways, and somehow that makes them exactly what Lucas needs. Matthew Quick crafts a story about how communities hold each other up when the world fractures. There's darkness here—real darkness, the kind that makes national news—but the book moves toward light with surprising gentleness. Lucas's voice is achingly sincere, almost childlike in its hope, and watching him rebuild his life becomes a meditation on resilience and human connection. This isn't a book about recovery in neat stages. It's messier than that, stranger than that, and ultimately more hopeful. Quick asks what it means to survive the unsurvivable, and his answer involves puppet shows, bonfires, and the stubborn insistence that we are not meant to grieve alone.Publication dateNovember 1, 2022Amazon rating4.4/5Print length256LanguageEnglishPublisherAvid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Frequently Asked Questions about Matthew Quick
Matthew Quick's books are generally standalone novels, so there is no required reading order. You can begin with any title that catches your interest. The books are not connected by a continuous storyline or recurring characters, allowing readers to explore them in any sequence they prefer. This approach means each novel offers a fresh start and a self-contained narrative experience. Readers often choose a starting point based on cover art, a synopsis that resonates, or a recommendation from a friend.
A good place to start with Matthew Quick's novels is The Silver Linings Playbook, published in 2012. This book achieved significant recognition and was adapted into a film. Its narrative explores themes of mental health, family, and finding hope, which are characteristic of Quick's writing. Another accessible entry point is Sorta Like a Rock Star, his 2011 debut standalone novel, which introduces his distinctive voice and focus on complex characters navigating difficult circumstances.
No, you do not have to read Matthew Quick's books in any specific order. The vast majority of his novels are standalone stories, meaning each book can be read independently of the others. They do not rely on prior knowledge of characters or plotlines from previous works. This allows readers the freedom to pick up any title and enjoy a complete narrative without feeling lost. The only exception is the Order of Anthologies series, which consists of a single book.
Matthew Quick primarily writes standalone novels. While he has one entry listed under 'Order of Anthologies,' titled Break These Rules, all his other published works fall into the category of standalone novels. These books are not part of a series and do not feature recurring characters or interconnected plot arcs. Each novel offers a unique story that can be enjoyed on its own.
Matthew Quick has written at least twelve books. His bibliography includes several standalone novels and one entry in an anthology series. The standalone novels cover a range of years, with his writing career beginning in the early 2010s. Specific titles include Sorta Like a Rock Star, The Silver Linings Playbook, Boy21, Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, and The Good Luck of Right Now, among others.
The first book Matthew Quick wrote and published was Sorta Like a Rock Star, released in 2011. This novel introduced readers to his characteristic style of storytelling, which often focuses on characters facing significant personal challenges and finding their way through complex emotional landscapes. It set the stage for his subsequent works, many of which explore similar themes of resilience, family, and the search for connection.
As of my last update, Matthew Quick's most recent book is not explicitly detailed in the provided information. His published works span from 2011 through at least 2015, with multiple titles released in those years. To find the absolute latest publication, checking a current bookseller's website or the author's official site would be the most reliable method.
Matthew Quick writes contemporary fiction that often delves into the lives of young people and adults grappling with significant emotional and social issues. His novels frequently explore themes of mental health, family dynamics, grief, and the search for identity and belonging. While not confined to a single genre, his work often contains elements of drama and coming-of-age stories, characterized by relatable characters and heartfelt narratives.
Randy Ribay
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Holly Smale
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We verified the reading order for Matthew Quick's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: April 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Matthew Quick Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/matthew-quick