Who Do You Love – Stories
1999 In this acclaimed collection, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Jean Thompson limns the lives of ordinary people — a lonely social worker, a down-and-out junkie, a divorced cop on the night shift — to extraordinary effect. With wisdom and sympathy and spare eloquence, she writes of their inarticulate longings for […]
Wide Blue Yonder
2003 From National Book Award-finalist Jean Thompson comes a compelling, highly charged novel about a family ruled by the weather, the drastic changes that hit their atmosphere, and a midwestern town where chaos doesn’t reign — it pours. Something big is headed for Springfield, Illinois, a place where weather of all kinds — climatic, emotional, […]
City Boy
2005 Newlyweds Jack and Chloe are building a life together in a modest Chicago apartment. The city is theirs to enjoy as Jack struggles to pursue a writing career and Chloe works downtown, applying herself to the world of high finance. While Jack aspires to be the perfect husband, his own self-doubts and Chloe’s office […]
Throw Like a Girl – Stories
2007 Here are twelve stories that take dead aim at the secrets of womanhood, arcing from youth to experience. Each one of Thompson’s indelible characters — lovers, wives, friends, and mothers — speaks her piece — wry, angry, hopeful — about the world and women’s places in it. A master of short fiction whose “best […]
Do Not Deny Me – Stories
2009 When Jean Thompson — “America’s Alice Munro” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review)—is telling stories, “You cannot put the book down” (The Seattle Times), and her superlative new collection, Do Not Deny Me, is one to be savored, word by word. Here is a title that demands — and commands — attention in and of itself. Yet […]
The Year We Left Home
2012 A New York Times bestseller in hardcover, The Year We Left Home is National Book Award finalist Jean Thompson’s mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family that captures the turbulent history of the country at large. Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People magazine “Pick of the Week,” and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections selection. The Year We Left Home is the career-defining […]
The Humanity Project
2014 After surviving a horrific shooting at her high school, fifteen-year-old Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, in California. Art, not much more than a child himself, doesn’t quite understand how or why he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen—and probably deeply damaged—adolescent girl. And although Linnea has […]
The Witch and Other Tales Re-Told
2014 Great fairy tales are not always stories designed for children. The lurking wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood,” the gingerbread house that lures Hansel and Gretel, the beauty asleep in her castle—these fables represent some of our deepest, most primeval fears and satisfy our longing for good to win out over evil (preferably in […]
She Poured Out Her Heart
2016 Jean discusses how the music of Prince helped her write sex scenes in She Poured Out Her Heart for Largehearted Boy’s Book Notes blog. Tracing the complicated friendship of two very different women who meet in college, She Poured Out Her Heart is a novel of remarkable psychological suspense, crafted by National Book Award finalist Jean […]
A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl
From National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author comes a moving family saga about three generations of women who struggle to find freedom and happiness in their small Midwestern college town.