Best Selling Books by Marianne Wiggins

A National Bestseller A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 Fifteen years after the publication of Evidence of Things Unseen, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Marianne Wiggins returns with a novel destined to be an American classic: a sweeping masterwork set during World War II about the meaning of family and the limitations of the American Dream. Rockwell “Rocky” Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the LA Water Corporation. It is here where he and his beloved wife Lou raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, and it is here where Rocky has mourned Lou in the years since her death. As Sunny and Stryker reach the cusp of adulthood, the country teeters on the brink of war. Stryker decides to join the fight, deploying to Pearl Harbor not long before the bombs strike. Soon, Rocky and his family find themselves facing yet another incomprehensible tragedy. Rocky is determined to protect his remaining family and the land where they’ve loved and lost so much. But when the government decides to build a Japanese-American internment camp next to the ranch, Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. Complicating matters is the fact that the idealistic Department of the Interior man assigned to build the camp, who only begins to understand the horror of his task after it may be too late, becomes infatuated with Sunny and entangled with the Rhodes family. Properties of Thirst is a novel that is both universal and intimate. It is the story of a changing American landscape and an examination of one of the darkest periods in this country’s past, told through the stories of the individual loves and losses that weave together to form the fabric of our shared history. Ultimately, it is an unflinching distillation of our nation’s essence—and a celebration of the bonds of love and family that persist against all odds.

This poetic historical novel, set between the world wars, tells the story of an American couple and their adopted son, Lightfoot.

An earthquake and tidal wave sweep John Dollar, Charlotte, and her pupils into the violent sea. They come to consciousness on the beach huddled around a paralyzed John Dollar.

Following her National Book Award finalist, Evidence of Things Unseen, Marianne Wiggins turns her extraordinary literary imagination to the American West, where the life of legendary photographer Edward S. Curtis is the basis for a resonant exploration of history and family, landscape and legacy. The Shadow Catcher dramatically inhabits the space where past and present intersect, seamlessly interweaving narratives from two different eras: the first fraught passion between turn-of-the-twentieth-century icon Edward Curtis (1868-1952) and his muse-wife, Clara; and a twenty-first-century journey of redemption. Narrated in the first person by a reimagined writer named Marianne Wiggins, the novel begins in Hollywood, where top producers are eager to sentimentalize the complicated life of Edward Curtis as a sunny biopic: "It''s got the outdoors. It''s got adventure. It''s got the do-good element." Yet, contrary to Curtis''s esteemed public reputation as servant to his nation, the artist was an absent husband and disappearing father. Jump to the next generation, when Marianne''s own father, John Wiggins (1920-1970), would live and die in equal thrall to the impulse of wanderlust. Were the two men running from or running to? Dodging the false beacons of memory and legend, Marianne amasses disparate clues -- photographs and hospital records, newspaper clippings and a rare white turquoise bracelet -- to recover those moments that went unrecorded, "to hear the words only the silent ones can speak." The Shadow Catcher, fueled by the great American passions for love and land and family, chases the silhouettes of our collective history into the bright light of the present.

Thirteen powerful, heartrending stories by the author of John Dollar.

Before his thirtieth birthday Holden Garfield has already burned out as a journalist in war-torn Bosnia. Returning to the United States, he hopes the familiar sunshine and rolling hills of Virginia will help him put aside the horrors he reported. Instead he finds Melanie, his mentor''s sister, who is institutionalized with a mysterious amnesia after her husband and son were killed five weeks earlier by a freak force of nature. Struck as if by lightning by her beauty, Holden sets out to help her reconstruct her past, and the pair is swept up in a passionate love affair -- one fighting to remember, the other struggling to forget. With this breakneck story of love and loss, Marianne Wiggins delivers a compelling novel that is a series of powerful metaphors for the curative forces of love as well as her own personal love letter to the American South.

A romance between Noah John, an American foreign correspondent, and Lilith Luciana da Vinci, a glamorous news photographer. They meet in Africa, he moves into her apartment in Paris, she drops him for a Rumanian politician who sells HIV-polluted blood, but they will meet again. By the author of John Dollar.

With an introduction by Marianne Wiggins and an Afterword by Jay Dusard.

Co-published with Art Museum of South Texas, Catalog of the Sondra Gilman collection.

Una épica historia de amor ambientada en California durante uno de los episodios más oscuros de la segunda guerra mundial. «Una obra maestra.» The New York Times Rocky Rhodes lleva años protegiendo con uñas y dientes su rancho de California frente al Departamento de Aguas de Los Ángeles que está drenando sus acuíferos. Es en ese rancho del valle de Owens donde su mujer y él criaron a sus hijos gemelos, Sunny y Stryker, y donde Rocky ha llorado a su esposa desde su muerte. Cuando Estados Unidos entra en la segunda guerra mundial, el gobierno decide construir en el valle uno de los campos de internamiento en los que confinará a los más de cien mil ciudadanos de origen japonés que viven en los estados de la costa del Pacífico. El director del campo, un chico judío de Chicago, quedará fascinado por la familia Rhodes, especialmente por la joven Sunny. Las propiedades de la sed es una inolvidable novela sobre uno de los episodios más oscuros del pasado estadounidense, pero también es una historia de amor: el de una familia por un paisaje amenazado y el de un hombre por una mujer asombrosa. Una historia universal e íntima, cuyos ecos resuenan especialmente hoy en día, sobre la celebración de los vínculos amorosos y familiares que sobreviven a pesar de las dificultades. Sin duda, una de las grandes novelas americanas de los últimos años. «Esta magnífica novela toca el nervio sensible del lenguaje y produce descargas eléctricas que sacuden al lector. Es una historia de amor, el relato de una familia y un canto a la historia. Habla de la vergüenza, la pérdida, la recuperación y la belleza. Una novela que atesorar, escrita con gran humor y humanidad.» Colum McCann «Más que contar una historia, Wiggins hace que el lector la viva (...). Reinventa nuestra idea de lo que la ficción es capaz hacer.» The Sunday Times «Una novela poética y arrolladora que me atrapó desde las primeras páginas.» Nora Krug (The Washington Post)