Elizabeth McKenzie – författare

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen 'Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE'A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over, she’s quit her job, her parents have been missing in the Australian outback for five years and now she’s back home in Santa Barbara, dealing with mounting family crises and living out of a borrowed van named The Dog of the North.The Dog is replete with gingham curtains, wood panelling, a piñata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It’s also Penny’s getaway car from the curveballs life’s throwing at her. With an uncertain future ahead of her, could the road she’s on lead her back to herself?

A riotously funny and deeply insightful adventure through capitalism, the medical industry, family, love, war and wedding-planning – from an electrically entertaining new voiceMeet Veblen: a passionate defender of the anti-consumerist views of her name-sake, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen. She’s an experienced cheerer-upper (mainly of her narcissistic, hypochondriac, controlling mother), an amateur translator of Norwegian, and a firm believer in the distinct possibility that the plucky grey squirrel following her around can understand more than it lets on.Meet her fiancé, Paul: the son of good hippies who were bad parents, a no-nonsense, high-flying neuroscientist with no time for squirrels. His recent work on a device to minimize battlefield trauma has led him dangerously close to the seductive Cloris Hutmacher, heiress to a pharmaceuticals empire, who is promising him fame and fortune through a shady-sounding deal with the Department of Defence.What could possibly go wrong?

A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas – and squirrelsSHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN''S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016Can squirrels speak? Do snails scream?Will a young couple, newly engaged, make it to their wedding day? Will their dysfunctional families ruin everything? Will they be undone by the advances of a very sexy, very unscrupulous heiress to a pharmaceuticals corporation?Is getting married even a remotely reasonable idea in the twenty-first century?And what in the world is a ‘Veblen’ anyway?‘Raw and weird and hilarious’ Guardian‘A touching, wildly funny and peculiarly elegant look at the travails of love of all kinds’ Sunday Express‘Elizabeth McKenzie is clearly some sort of genius’ Paul Murray‘I can’t remember a book I enjoyed more’ Nina Stibbe‘Seriously funny and extraordinarily well written’ Jonathan Franzen, Guardian books of the year

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen 'Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE'A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen 'Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE'A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen 'Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE'A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTIONThe darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen''Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE''A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTIONThe darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen''Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE''A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLERPenny Rush has problems. Freshly divorced from her mobile knife-sharpener husband, she has returned home to Santa Barbara to deal with her grandfather, who is being moved into a retirement home by his cruel second wife. Her grandmother, meanwhile, has been found in possession of a sinister sounding weapon called ‘the scintilltor’ and something even worse in her woodshed. Penny’s parents have been missing in the Australian outback for many years now, and so Penny must deal with this spiralling family crisis alone.Enter The Dog of The North. The Dog of the North is a borrowed van, replete with yellow gingham curtains, wood panelling, a futon, a pinata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It is also Penny’s getaway car from a failed marriage, a family in crisis and an uncertain future. This darkly, dryly comic novel follows Penny as she sets out in The Dog to find a way through the curveballs life has thrown at her and in doing so, find a way back to herself.

From the start of Elizabeth McKenzie’s beguiling fiction debut, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. Stop That Girl chronicles Ann’s colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond. Along the way, she discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman’s life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, sour landlords, and an iconoclast grandmother, known even to her family as Dr. Frost. Keenly funny and highly original, Stop That Girl is a brilliant examination of the exigencies of love and the fragile fabric of family, and heralds the emergence of a remarkable new voice in fiction.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The highly acclaimed author of Stop That Girl delivers a masterfully plotted debut novel–at once a mystery of identity, sly literary satire, and coming-of age story–capturing a young man’s impossible and heroic first love.Twenty-two-year-old MacGregor West, orphaned as a boy, is on a quest: to understand the circumstances of his mother’s untimely death. On a foggy San Francisco evening, guided by an old stack of envelopes, Mac finds himself at the mansion of cultural icon Charles Ware, where he encounters the writer’s beautiful and enigmatic daughter, Carolyn, trapped in a fold-up bed. Upon freeing her, Mac plunges headlong into the world of the eccentric Ware family and a love affair with a woman whose murky history may be closely linked to his own.MacGregor Tells the World is a poignant and often hilarious ride through present-day San Francisco, a city brimming with memorable characters who help Mac discover just what story is his to tell.Praise for Elizabeth McKenzie’s Stop That Girl“Elizabeth McKenzie is an accomplished humorist and a developed stylist, and she wastes no time dazzling the reader with her clean direct language, her simple but searing use of metaphor and her unflinching eye.”–The New York Times Book Review“Single-handedly reinvigorate[s] the coming-of-age genre. . . . Here is a writer to watch, and a book to breeze through with glee.”–San Francisco ChronicleFrom the Trade Paperback edition.

* A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * “A vibrant novel that combines slapstickcomedy with poignancy.” —The New YorkerPenny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she’s quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what’s possible when all else fails. Elizabeth McKenzie, the National Book Award–nominated author of The Portable Veblen, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a piñata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother. What is “the Scintillator”? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way? This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life’s curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction

Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women''s Fiction

An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributorThe Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift. Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

From the Hardcover edition.

ONE BED. ONE RULE: DON'T CATCH FEELINGS.With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of THE PARADISE PROBLEM and THE LOVE HYPOTHESISChemistry teacher Ashleigh Hutchinson knows better than anyone that love and lust don’t mix. The feelings come from different hormones, they trigger different responses, and they demand different reactions. Which is why she doesn’t date. She hooks up. No catching feelings required.When Ashleigh is fired from her job without notice, she signs up to participate in a month-long sleep study, which will pay her enough to cover rent while she job hunts. It seems easy enough—until she walks into the clinic and finds herself staring right into the gorgeous eyes of Xander Miller, the only man to have ever tempted her to abandon her no-relationships rule.When Xander and Ashleigh realize the study is only looking for couples, they agree to pretend to be together—which means sleeping in the same bed every night for the next few weeks.How hard can it be to keep their cool under the covers?You can expect...💖Fake dating (for science)🛏️Only one bed (every night)🙅‍♀️No feelings (allegedly)💕Second chance romance🐶Golden retriever MMC💋Hot mess FMC😂Banter as a love language🧪Undeniable chemistry!'Incredible. This book glued me to the pages from start to finish. The voice is sharp and sassy, the banter actually crackles, and the chemistry is spectacular, the addictive push–pull that keeps you saying “just one more chapter” until there aren’t any left.' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'I almost laughed until I cried from the first night alone. This book is absolutely hilarious!' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'This is one of those books I just LOVED because of the banter, the moments between the FMC and the MMC, the vulnerability, and just the palpable chemistry coming off the pages!' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐'Sizzling from the very start!' ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Brought to you by Penguin.With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of THE PARADISE PROBLEM and THE LOVE HYPOTHESISChemistry teacher Ashleigh Hutchinson knows better than anyone that love and lust don't mix. The feelings come from different hormones, they trigger different responses, and they demand different reactions. Which is why she doesn't date. She hooks up. No catching feelings required.When Ashleigh is fired from her job without notice, she signs up to participate in a month-long sleep study, which will pay her enough to cover rent while she job hunts. It seems easy enough-until she walks into the clinic and finds herself staring right into the gorgeous eyes of Xander Miller, the only man to have ever tempted her to abandon her no-relationships rule.When Xander and Ashleigh realize the study is only looking for couples, they agree to pretend to be together-which means sleeping in the same bed every night for the next few weeks. How hard can it be to keep their cool under the covers?You can expect...- Fake dating (for science)- Only one bed (every night)- No feelings (allegedly)- Second chance romance- Golden retriever MMC- Hot mess FMC- Banter as a love language- Undeniable chemistry!(c) Elizabeth McKenzie 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026