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In 1996, two years before Election was published, the producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger handed the manuscript to the director Alexander Payne; the film was shot in 1997, a year before the novel reached the shops. Tom Perrotta, born in 1961 and raised in Garwood, New Jersey, the son of a mail carrier, has been writing about the suburbs ever since: student elections, sex-education classes, soccer fields, town pools, and in The Leftovers a town in New York after two per cent of the world’s population has vanished. Four of his books have reached the screen, and he co-wrote two of the adaptations. This guide covers his eleven key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1994–2026 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Tom Perrotta has published eleven books: nine novels and two story collections. The best known are Election (1998), filmed in 1999 with Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick, Little Children (2004) and The Leftovers (2011), which he turned into an HBO series with Damon Lindelof. Start with Little Children; his newest novel is Ghost Town (2026).
Where to Start with Tom Perrotta
If you want his most acclaimed novel
→ Little Children (2004) — the 2004 book on several best-of-the-year lists.
If you want the book behind Tracy Flick
→ Election (1998) — then its 2022 sequel.
If you watched the HBO series
→ The Leftovers (2011) — the novel the show grew out of.
If you want something short first
→ Nine Inches (2013) — stories set in the same suburban world.
11 Tom Perrotta Books, in Order
Bad Haircut
His first book, published by Bridge Works: linked stories following Buddy, an ordinary boy in the New Jersey town of Darwin, through the 1970s and early 1980s. The early stories cover childhood and the Boy Scouts; the later ones driver’s education, first sex, heartbreak and the prom.
The Wishbones
Dave Raymond is 31, still lives in his parents’ house and plays guitar in the Wishbones, a New Jersey wedding band, while hoping for something bigger. After the death of a fellow musician he proposes to his girlfriend on impulse, and almost immediately regrets it.
Election
A student-council election at Winwood High, a suburban New Jersey school, in 1992. The history teacher Jim McAllister sets out to stop the ambitious Tracy Flick by recruiting a popular student to run against her, and the race goes wrong in ways that cost him his job. Perrotta said the idea came from the three-way Bush, Clinton and Perot presidential race. Alexander Payne’s 1999 film, with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick, was shot before the book came out.
Joe College
Danny is a junior at Yale who spends his breaks driving his father’s lunch truck in New Jersey. He is caught between a pregnant girlfriend at home he wants to leave, a Yale classmate he cannot stop thinking about, and his father’s shady business rivals.
Little Children
One hot summer in an unnamed Boston suburb, Sarah, a stay-at-home mother in an unhappy marriage, and Todd, a stay-at-home father avoiding the bar exam, begin an affair that starts with a kiss on a dare from the other mothers. Alongside them runs the story of Ronnie McGorvey, a convicted sex offender who has moved back in with his mother, and the retired policeman who hounds him. It appeared on the best-books-of-2004 lists of The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, NPR and People. Todd Field’s 2006 film, co-written with Perrotta, received three Academy Award nominations.
The Abstinence Teacher
In the suburb of Stonewood Heights, the high-school teacher Ruth Ramsey gives an offhand answer to a student’s question about oral sex, and after an evangelical church, the Tabernacle of the Gospel Truth, threatens to sue, she is made to teach a sex-education course with a Christian slant. Her story crosses with that of Tim Mason, a former rock musician saved by the church, who coaches her daughter’s soccer team and leads the girls in prayer after a game. The New York Times named it a Notable Book of 2007.
The Leftovers
Two per cent of the world’s population disappears at once in a Rapture-like event. In Mapleton, a town in New York, the Garvey family comes apart: Kevin, a local businessman who runs for mayor, wants life to return to normal; his wife Laurie joins the Guilty Remnant, a silent cult in white clothes that chain-smokes in public; their son drifts into a New Age movement. HBO bought the rights before publication and ran the series, co-created by Perrotta and Damon Lindelof, from 2014 to 2017.
Nine Inches
His second collection, set in a suburb that could be the same one throughout. In the title story a young teacher with a pregnant wife chaperones a middle-school dance; the last story, “The All-Night Party”, follows a divorced woman and the policeman who once gave her a ticket. Other stories deal with estranged neighbours, betrayed spouses and widowed or divorced adults starting again.
Mrs. Fletcher
Eve Fletcher, divorced and in her mid-forties, runs a senior centre; when her son Brendan leaves for college, she signs up for a class at the local community college and starts exploring her sexuality. HBO adapted it as a seven-episode series in 2019 starring Kathryn Hahn.
Tracy Flick Can’t Win
The sequel to Election. Tracy Flick is now in her mid-forties, a single mother and assistant principal at a New Jersey high school who wants the top job. To help her chances she backs a wealthy donor’s plan for a school Hall of Fame, whose first inductee is to be a former football star, Vito Falcone; the choice opens up divisions of class and race at the school.
Ghost Town
Creamwood, a 1970s New Jersey suburb a few miles from Manhattan. At the end of eighth grade Jimmy Perrini’s mother dies, and he falls in with an older troublemaker with a fast car and a smart, eccentric girl who suggests they try to reach his mother with a Ouija board. Decades later Jimmy, now a writer of a children’s series, is invited back to his hometown. Perrotta has said the Ouija board came out of his own teenage experiments in Garwood. Published by Scribner in April 2026.
In What Order to Read Tom Perrotta
Only one pair of books has to be read in order: Election (1998) before Tracy Flick Can’t Win (2022), which picks up Tracy more than two decades later. Everything else stands alone, so you can start with whichever subject or adaptation brought you here.
Publication order shows a clear shape. The first four books are about young men in New Jersey; Little Children, The Abstinence Teacher and Mrs. Fletcher move to adult life in the suburbs; The Leftovers is his one excursion into the speculative; and Ghost Town goes back to the New Jersey of his own childhood.
A reading path
1. Little Children (2004)
2. Election (1998)
3. The Leftovers (2011)
4. Tracy Flick Can’t Win (2022)
5. Ghost Town (2026)
The years · 1961–2026
Quick facts about Tom Perrotta
- Known for
- Comic, sympathetic novels about the American suburbs, several of them adapted for film and television, from Election to The Leftovers
- 1961
- Born in New Jersey; grows up in Garwood
- 1998
- Election
- 2006
- Oscar nomination for the Little Children screenplay
- 2014
- The Leftovers begins on HBO
- 2026
- Ghost Town
- Born
- 13 August 1961, New Jersey; grew up in Garwood, where his father was a mail carrier
- Education
- Yale University (BA, 1983); Syracuse University (MA), where he studied with Tobias Wolff
- Taught
- Creative writing at Yale, then expository writing at Harvard from 1994
- Screen
- Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, Little Children (with Todd Field); co-creator of HBO’s The Leftovers
- Married
- The writer Mary Granfield, in 1991
- Lives
- Belmont, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston
The red mark is 1998: Election, the novel that introduced Tracy Flick.
How Tom Perrotta Writes: The Suburbs, Up Close
Nearly all of Perrotta’s fiction is set in the American suburbs, first the New Jersey towns he grew up in and later the suburbs of Boston, where he lives. The dramas are ordinary ones: a school election, a sex-education class, a son leaving for college, a summer at the town pool. Time called him “the Steinbeck of Suburbia”. He has said he never wanted to write only for readers who think of themselves as literary.
He likes to tell a story through several people at once. Election is told from several characters’ points of view, which was part of what drew Alexander Payne to the book; Little Children and The Leftovers cut between households. The tone is comic, but he rarely lets a character become only a joke. Reviewing Little Children in The New York Times, Will Blythe asked “how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling.”
Film and television have shaped his career more than most novelists’. He co-wrote the screenplay of Little Children with Todd Field and co-created The Leftovers for HBO with Damon Lindelof, and he has come back to his own characters: Tracy Flick returned in 2022, and Ghost Town (2026) draws on his own teenage years in Garwood, Ouija board included.
Watch
Tom Perrotta at the New York State Writers Institute
Perrotta at the New York State Writers Institute in Albany in 2011, the year The Leftovers was published.
Frequently asked questions about Tom Perrotta’s books
How many books has Tom Perrotta written?
Eleven under his own name: nine novels and two story collections, from Bad Haircut (1994) to Ghost Town (2026). All eleven are on this page.
What are Tom Perrotta’s books in order?
Bad Haircut (1994), The Wishbones (1997), Election (1998), Joe College (2000), Little Children (2004), The Abstinence Teacher (2007), The Leftovers (2011), Nine Inches (2013), Mrs. Fletcher (2017), Tracy Flick Can’t Win (2022) and Ghost Town (2026).
Where should I start with Tom Perrotta?
Little Children (2004), the novel that made several best-of-the-year lists and became an Oscar-nominated film. If you already know the film of Election, the novel is a short, quick way in, and leads straight to its sequel.
What is Tom Perrotta’s most famous book?
Election (1998), because of Alexander Payne’s 1999 film with Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick and Matthew Broderick as the teacher who tries to stop her. The Leftovers (2011) is the best known since HBO’s series.
Which Tom Perrotta books have been adapted?
Four. Election became a film in 1999; Little Children a film by Todd Field in 2006, with Kate Winslet; The Leftovers an HBO series that ran for three seasons and 28 episodes, from 2014 to 2017; and Mrs. Fletcher a seven-episode HBO series in 2019, with Kathryn Hahn.
Is The Leftovers TV series different from the book?
Yes. The first season loosely follows the novel, but Kevin Garvey is reimagined as the town’s police chief. The second and third seasons leave the book behind, moving from Mapleton to Jarden, Texas, and then to Australia.
Is Tracy Flick Can’t Win a sequel to Election?
Yes. Published in 2022, it finds Tracy Flick in her mid-forties as an assistant principal at a New Jersey high school, still trying to win: this time the job of principal.
Has Tom Perrotta won an Oscar?
No, but he was nominated. He and Todd Field shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for Little Children (2006), one of the film’s three nominations.
What is Ghost Town about?
His 2026 novel follows Jimmy Perrini, a boy in 1970s New Jersey whose mother dies at the end of eighth grade, and the two older teenagers he falls in with, one of whom has a Ouija board. The story is told by Jimmy decades later, as a writer returning to his hometown.
Is Tom Perrotta still alive?
Yes. He was born on 13 August 1961 in New Jersey and lives in Belmont, Massachusetts. His most recent novel, Ghost Town, came out in April 2026.
Footnotes
- Tom Perrotta — Wikipedia
- Election (novel) — Wikipedia
- The Leftovers (TV series) — Wikipedia
- Tom Perrotta interview — BookPage, 2011
- Ghost Town — Kirkus Reviews, 2026
- Ouija boards and Tom Perrotta — Cambridge Day, 2026
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“I never wanted to write for a self-selected group of people who see themselves as literary.”
— Tom Perrotta, interview with BookPage (2011)
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