Skip to main content

Jessica Shattuck

Biography

Jessica Shattuck

Jessica Shattuck is the New York Times bestselling author of LAST HOUSE; THE WOMEN IN THE CASTLE; THE HAZARDS OF GOOD BREEDING, a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award; and PERFECT LIFE. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones and Wired, among other publications.

Jessica Shattuck

Books by Jessica Shattuck

by Jessica Shattuck - Fiction, Historical Fiction

It’s 1953, and for Nick Taylor, a WWII veteran turned company lawyer, oil is the key to the future. Nick comes from humble origins, but thanks to his work for American Oil, he can provide every comfort for his family, including Last House, a secluded country escape. Deep in the Vermont mountains, the Taylors are free from the stresses of modern life. It’s 1968, and America is on the brink of change. Protestors fill the streets to challenge everything from the Vietnam War to racism in the wake of MLK’s shooting --- to the country's reliance on Big Oil. As Nick’s daughter, Katherine, makes her first forays into adult life, she’s caught up in the current of the time and struggles to reconcile her ideals with the stable and privileged childhood her parents worked so hard to provide. But when the Movement shifts in a more radical direction, each member of the Taylor family will be forced to reckon with the consequences of the choices they’ve made for the causes they believed in.

by Jessica Shattuck - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany’s defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. As Marianne assembles a makeshift family from the ruins of her husband’s resistance movement, she is certain their shared pain and circumstances will hold them together. But she quickly discovers that the black-and-white, highly principled world of her privileged past has become infinitely more complicated, filled with secrets and dark passions that threaten to tear them apart.