The Apartment House on Poppy Hill

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Childrens Book of 2024!

Welcome to 1106 Wildflower Place: It is no ordinary apartment house, but you, reader, are no ordinary visitor. So, please, come in!

Two new tenants have just arrived, and nine-year-old Ella is determined to help them settle in. Who better to teach them about the glitchy lights and the nighttime noises? After all, Ella knows all the neighbors. Well, almost all. No one has met the mysterious Robinsons who live on the top floor. Will a special neighborly celebration change all that? This bighearted chapter book by bestselling author Nina LaCour, highlighted by lively illustrations throughout, celebrates community, friendship, family, and home. It is a place of walking dogs that aren’t yours, keeping surprises secret, and making everyone feel welcome.

Here, the eccentric joy of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of The City merges seamlessly with the antic fun of Ivy + Bean, the family tenderness of The Penderwicks, and the madcap adventure of Eloise in an irresistible story that will leave you eager for the next one!

Praise for Yerba Buena

“Unfold[s] like the slowly blossoming flavors of a well-made drink . . . The book is a sensory feast, teeming with vivid detail. . . . LaCour’s writing shines. . . . Bitter and salty and sweet all at once.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A study of complex, modern love . . . Yerba Buena is observed with a cool, generous eye in spare, quiet prose that expertly illuminates the trauma that Sara and Emilie are both wrestling with, as well as their hope and healing. . . . Beautiful character-driven fiction that lingers like a perfectly mixed cocktail.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Sweet and bitter and full . . . [LaCour] understands her characters so well that you can sit back, sink in, and trust the story.” —Los Angeles Times

“A lesbian love story for the ages.” —Vogue

“A Carol for our times, Yerba Buena is a sweetly sweeping love story about two women trying to find themselves in the middle of Los Angeles.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“A poignant, beautiful novel.” —The Washington Post

“A love story as vibrant as its cover . . . A perfect beach read: two women meet at a fashionable restaurant known as—yougot it—Yerba Buena, and there embark on a journey of addiction, self-discovery, renewal, and, perhaps, real commitment.” —Elle

“The sumptuousness of the prose and its reflections of Southern California—its food, its drink, its intimacies—will make you want to take a long, slow drive along an ocean vista.” —Vulture

“A remarkable journey featuring two aching women on perpendicular paths toward a crossroads of connection.” —BuzzFeed

“[A] slow-burn, heartfelt story.” —Time

“A heartbreakingly beautiful story about two lost women who somehow find each other and in doing so find themselves.” —Electric Literature

“A will-they-won’t-they that’s both quietly devastating and deeply relatable for anyone who’s struggled to decide what they can risk for love.” —Good Housekeeping

“The perfect book to bask in this summer . . . Yerba Buena accomplishes in one novel what Sally Rooney attempted in three.” —Autostraddle

“A tender and at times heartbreaking love story between two women finding their way in life . . . A delicately devastating and beautifully perceptive journey.” —Bust

“Enthralling.” —Bustle

“Romantic . . . LaCour examines love and finding one’s life purpose.” —PopSugar

“Atmospheric, lush, and distinctly Californian.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune

★ “Quietly powerful . . . Brilliantly observed . . . Sara and Emilie are such fully realized characters that by the end of the novel, you will feel as though you’ve spent time with cherished friends. Bursting with emotionally resonant moments and vivid details of LA neighborhoods, Yerba Buena is a remarkable story of queer love and childhood trauma, addiction and forgiveness, family legacies and new beginnings.” —BookPage (boxed and starred review)

★ “Lyrical and ultimately hopeful. Yerba buena—the ‘good herb,’ which is also the name of the restaurant where Sara and Emilie meet—carries the reader through the pain and symbolizes a better future.” —Booklist (starred review)

“LaCour writes with beauty and clarity about how a relationship is not a substitute for the characters’ mutual need to love themselves.” —Publishers Weekly

“The rawness of Sara’s and Emilie’s struggles comes through, making for a heartfelt story. A brisk, plot-driven, and entertaining novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Yerba Buena is at turns decadent and spare, intimate and elusive, as balanced, fragrant, and masterfully crafted as a fine cocktail in the hands of someone mysterious and beautiful. This book is a precious thing.” —Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author of One Last Stop

“Nina LaCour’s Yerba Buena is a love story for our time. I so admired its truth and candor, the lilting prose and the two compelling protagonists, Sara and Emilie, whose lives weave, break, and bend toward each other until the novel’s moving and deeply satisfying conclusion. Yerba Buena is an absolute joy to read.” —Tara Conklin, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Romantics

“Nina LaCour’s writing is so evocative that it’s hard to put down (I read Yerba Buena in one day). The attention to detail allows you to be transported—you can just about taste the food, be in the rooms, and even feel the feelings the characters are experiencing.” —Julia Turshen, New York Times bestselling author of Simply Julia and more cookbooks

“Tactile, tender, and intimate, Yerba Buena is a gorgeous, sensory exploration of life’s richest moments. Led by two soulful and complex women, it is a joy to read.” —Charlotte McConaghy, New York Times bestselling author of Once There Were Wolves and Migrations

“Yerba Buena tells two lovely, tangled, gorgeously detailed coming-of-age stories. It is a novel full of heartbreak and hope, food and flowers, complication and compromise, love and loss, and lessons learned the hard way. But especially love.” —Laurie Frankel, New York Times bestselling author of One Two Three and This Is How It Always Is

“Yerba Buena is not just a book to read; it’s a story to revel in, so full is it of sensual pleasures—food and flowers, cocktails and home decor—all of it enveloping a sexy, magnetic, and unputdownable love story of two young women fighting their way past family demons and toward each other. This is Nina LaCour’s best work yet.” —Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and We Are Inevitable

“Such a sublimely crafted narrative about the truths our hearts hold and the lies [they tell] to protect us, of the paths that carve us and the ones we carve for ourselves, of reckonings and reconcilings. Nina LaCour has written an affecting, gratifying, and memorable love letter to beginnings in the way only Nina LaCour can. Gorgeous.” —Courtney Summers, New York Times bestselling author of Sadie

Praise for Watch Over Me

“Gripping.” —The New York Times

★ “A painfully compelling gem from a masterful creator.” —Booklist

★ “An emotion-packed must-read.” —Kirkus

★ “Richly atmospheric and both haunting and hopeful, Watch Over Me is a rewarding novel about a young woman on the brink of a new life.” —BookPage

★ “Moving, unsettling, and full of atmospheric beauty.” —SLJ

★ “LaCour’s portrait of a young woman yearning to belong and facing her past while navigating the liminal space between childhood and adulthood brims with tender moments and sensory details.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Lyrical and atmospheric.” —The Horn Book

“Nina LaCour . . . offers a mesmerizing tale of a girl suffocating in loneliness and haunted by the ghosts of her past in this powerful, well-crafted novel..”
—The Buffalo News

You Know Me Well

“You Know Me Well perfectly encapsulates those fraught, end-all-be-all feelings of high-school romance and graduation. The raw emotion of this novel will delight fans of Rainbow Rowell and John Green.” –BookPage

“Often subtle and always absorbing examination of fraught relationships…popular authors LaCour and Levithan tell their heartfelt story seamlessly in chapters that alternate between Mark’s and Kate’s respective points of view and invite readers’ emotional engagement with these two empathetic teens.” –Booklist

“Teens, queer or straight, are often dramatic and unsure of themselves, and by moving its characters beyond the coming-out trope and giving them other questions to focus on, this book gives them room to be.”
–Horn Book Review

“Nina LaCour and David Levithan are two of the best YA authors working right now, and this story is further proof. This fun, sweet novel beautifully captures the power of romantic and platonic love alike.”
–Seventeen Magazine 

“Levithan and LaCour beautifully capture what it’s like to have a romance against the backdrop of the cool grey city of love. There is something about this place that renders everything full of magic.” –Forever Young Adult

”A sweet, hopeful story about finding the courage to live your truth ― whatever it may be. And of course, it's a story about the friends who guide us through it all.” –Bustle