Jane Mendelsohn is an American author. Her first novel was the critically acclaimed international bestseller I WAS AMELIA EARHART. Born and raised in New York City, she attended the Horace Mann School and Yale, where she was a Connecticut Student Poet and graduated summa cum laude. After attending Yale Law School for one year, she left to pursue writing. She began publishing literary reviews in the Village Voice in 1990. Since then, her reviews have appeared in The Guardian, the New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Yale Review and the London Review of Books.

Her first novel, I WAS AMELIA EARHART, was published by Knopf in 1996 and became a New York Times bestseller. It was translated into many languages and short-listed for the Orange Prize. Her second novel, Innocence, was published in 2000. It is being developed as a feature film by Killer Films. Her most recent book is AMERICAN MUSIC, published by Knopf to wide acclaim in the summer of 2010 and now out in paperback from Vintage.

She lives in New York City with her husband and daughters.

Books by Jane Mendelsohn

Burning Down the House

by Jane Mendelsohn - Fiction

It begins with two girls: Neva, from the Caucasus, sold into the sex trade; and Poppy, the adopted daughter of a wealthy New York real estate family, the Zanes. As their paths cross and their fates intertwine in an exquisite high drama that blurs the lines between realism and myth, we travel with them from lavish weddings to the transglobal underworld; from London and New York to Laos and Istanbul; and we watch as the mighty Zane dynasty slips from greatness. Jane Mendelsohn captures the emotional worlds of these characters with visceral immediacy, and transforms their private narratives into a larger story about the forces of globalization, human trafficking and sexual violence.

American Music

by Jane Mendelsohn - Fiction, Historical Fiction

At this novel's center are Milo, a severely wounded veteran of the Iraq War confined to a rehabilitation hospital, and Honor, his physical therapist, a former dancer. When Honor touches Milo’s destroyed back, mysterious images from the past appear to each of them, puzzling her and shaking him to the core.

I Was Amelia Earhart

by Jane Mendelsohn