Our Lady of the Prairie

"As gripping as it is hilarious. " - Vanity Fair. "I devoured this novel. It just made my whole being vibrate and hum with the impossible, inevitable business of loving other people. " - Leslie Jamison, New York Times. best-selling author of The Empathy Exams. and The Recovering. For Phillipa Maakestad-theater professor and mother to a troubled, volatile daughter-life is finally, miraculously calm. What better moment, then, to fall headlong into a passionate affair, fly off to France with her new lover, and effectively take a match to her life on the Iowa prairie. As she steps back to survey the damage and determine her way forward, Phillipa must contend with a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her otherwise docile husband. Which is to say: the damage is not easily contained, and the path ahead is not clear. Thisbe Nissen offers up a fever-pitched, bitingly funny novel about a woman's quest to find her place in her own story. Our Lady of the Prairie. is a bravura performance-a twister sweeping through the heart of the land and the land of the heart. "Wonderfully witty. " - Chicago Review of Books. "Brazen, sexy, and whip-smart. " - Refinery29.