Thisbe Nissen’s sharp, sexy novel is a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart

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.