Mary Beth McGruder is a North Carolina coastal writer of fiction and essays about love, marriage, grief, and the small mercies that keep us afloat.

A lifelong storyteller, she began writing in earnest after retiring, finally claiming the quiet and the hours to put long-carried stories on the page. She writes upmarket domestic suspense and speculative-leaning fiction rooted in family life, and she also publishes memoir and personal essays.

She recently completed The Library of Borrowed Days, a speculative short story about love, marriage, and grief, in which a hidden library annex lends days from alternate lives and borrowed time comes with rules, costs, and consequences. She is in final edits for Public Trust, an upmarket domestic suspense novel set between Charleston and Paris, where a carefully curated marriage and real estate empire begin to crack and a woman trained in optics quietly builds the story that will save her.

Read new stories and essays on Substack at Mary Beth McGruder | Stories from the North Carolina Coast.