Our Lady of the Prairie

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.

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 work has been published in the Iowa Review, the American Scholar, and Vogue, among others. She teaches at Western Michigan University.