Description

“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