John Nichols Books in Order

Jerry Payne meets the unforgettable Pookie Adams on a bus ride and is pulled into a love affair he never expected. Funny and sad in equal measure, the novel tracks how first love can open a heart and break it.

During World War II, eleven-year-old Wendall Oler is sent to live with relatives in rural Vermont. Angry, lonely, and acting out, he slowly finds warmth in a family he meant to resist.

When Joe Mondragon illegally taps an irrigation ditch to water his beanfield, a small act of defiance turns into a townwide fight. Funny, messy, and deeply rooted in place, the novel pits local farmers against power brokers and developers.

A bus explosion creates a hot spring, and suddenly forgotten Chamisaville becomes a boomtown. Over decades, Nichols shows miracle turning into money, as locals fight developers, corruption, and the slow theft of land, culture, and belonging.

Bart Darling is about to risk his life on a movie stunt, even as his pregnant girlfriend threatens to leave. When his distant son arrives to help, desire and resentment tangle into a raw family triangle.

Joe Miniver wants to buy a last scrap of land in Chamisaville and hold his family together. Instead he stumbles into drugs, temptation, and public chaos in a wild, funny, sad novel about a place losing its old balance.

This memoir looks at the sagebrush plain west of Taos and finds a whole world in it. Nichols blends close observation, personal reflection, and environmental worry into a book about paying attention to a fragile place.

Michael Smith comes home from Vietnam carrying memories he cannot shake. In New Mexico he tries to build a life, but Nichols keeps forcing him, and the reader, to face how violence abroad bleeds into ordinary American life.

A fifty-year-old man with a weak heart and two failed marriages falls into a brief, charged relationship with a nineteen-year-old woman. Their September affair becomes a quiet reckoning with age, desire, and the life he can no longer pretend is endless.

Part nature writing, part environmental warning, this book pairs Nichols's photographs with his plainspoken case for living more lightly on the land. It is rooted in New Mexico, but its argument reaches far beyond one place.

Roger thinks marrying Zelda will turn passion into lasting happiness. Instead he lands in a volatile battle of jealousy, sex, ego, and middle-aged chaos, as Nichols turns marriage into a darkly comic contact sport.

In early 1960s Greenwich Village, a shy aspiring writer finds friendship, mischief, and love around a tiny empanada stand. Nichols turns a bohemian corner of New York into a warm, funny coming-of-age story with a bittersweet edge.

After a heart scare, sixty-five-year-old writer Jonathan Kepler decides he must climb a New Mexico peak with his adult children. The trip becomes a stubborn, funny, painful bid for redemption, family peace, and one last chance to feel fully alive.

In words and photographs, Nichols traces his long bond with the Taos valley, nearby mountains, and the creatures that share them. It is part memoir, part field notebook, and part love letter to a lived-in landscape.

Nichols looks back on his writing life with candor, humor, and very little self-mythologizing. The memoir moves through books, marriages, politics, Hollywood, money troubles, and the daily work of trying to live as an artist.