Marianne Wiggins Books in Order

Encouraged by her psychiatrist to write about her family, Ellery McQueen turns her attention to the formidable women around her. Her account of mothers, cousins and other relations becomes a humorous exploration of family influence and personal understanding.

These stories explore the unruly effects of desire, jealousy, love, and revenge across varied lives and settings. Wiggins uses a range of voices to follow people whose emotional attachments expose unexpected wisdom, vulnerability, and disturbing impulses.

A widowed teacher leaves Britain for Burma and falls in love with a sailor, seeking escape from wartime grief. When a seafaring expedition ends in disaster, she and her pupils face an increasingly threatening struggle for survival on an isolated island.

Thirteen stories explore varied lives through distinctive language, shifting perspectives and carefully observed situations. Wiggins’s collection brings together short fiction whose voices and settings invite readers to consider how people understand themselves and the worlds they move through.

An American journalist and a photographer investigate a scandal involving contaminated blood at a Romanian orphanage. Their work draws them into a story of danger and intrigue, while the relationship developing between them adds a personal stake to the investigation.

Burned out by reporting war in Bosnia, Holden returns to Virginia hoping for relief. There he meets a woman left amnesiac after losing her husband and son, and their attraction binds his need to forget to her struggle to remember.

A veteran fascinated by light and scientific progress builds a life with his wife in Tennessee between the world wars. Their family’s fortunes become entangled with industrial development and atomic research, testing his faith in the promise of technology.

Stories inspired by photographer Edward Curtis’s encounters with Native Americans intertwine with accounts of a soldier, husband and father. The novel moves between public images and less visible lives, exploring the relationships and histories that photographs can reveal or obscure.

A California rancher resisting the loss of his land faces new upheaval as World War II transforms his family. The construction of a nearby Japanese American incarceration camp entangles private grief and romance with the government’s exercise of power.