Synopses & Reviews
A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises — and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself.
In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad — long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter — grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny’s wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) 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 heretofore docile husband.
Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.
Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election, Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp — a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.
Review
"Thisbe Nissen's Our Lady of the Prairie is a Midwestern fever dream, a bold and ambitious look into the roiling emotions of a woman caught between should and could, between I must and I want. I found it funny, angry, hopeful, heartfelt, and above all, honest: about marriage, family, and that old-fashioned, endlessly fascinating thing called desire.” Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End and The Dinner Party
Review
“I’ve been a Thisbe Nissen fan since page one of The Good People of New York. And now, loyalty rewarded! Our Lady of the Prairie delivers this wonderful author's characteristic wit, layered with delicious dysfunction, poignancy, and heart.” Elinor Lipman, author of On Turpentine Lane
Review
"I devoured this novel. It's full of the sweet, crazed, exhausted, love-saturated, tension-flecked bustle of family, and the finely-rendered complexities of intimacy — that vexing, sublime, shape-shifting beast. So much humanity and surprise in this book. It just made my whole being vibrate and hum with the impossible, inevitable business of loving other people." Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams and The Recovering
Review
"With humor, grace, and honesty, Nissen’s three heroines ride an emotional roller coaster as they reconcile their respective pasts, ride out a turbulent present, and, hopefully, secure a more serene future." Booklist
Review
"Wonderfully witty...A satirical take on the serene Midwestern life and an insightful, comical look at a woman whose life starts to unravel at breakneck speed." Chicago Review of Books, "The Most Anticipated Fiction Books of 2018"
About the Author
Thisbe Nissen is the author of a story collection, Out of the Girls' Room and Into the Night, and two novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. Her fiction has been published in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and elsewhere. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, with her husband, writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.
Thisbe Nissen on PowellsBooks.Blog
Describe your latest book.
Oh boy. How is it possible that after 14 years of working on this book, I still don’t know how to describe it...
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