Irish Girl »

TIM JOHNSTON was born in Iowa City, Iowa. When his first novel, Never So Green, was published, he was working as a carpenter in Hollywood, California. His fiction has been included in the O. Henry Prize Stories and David Sedaris’ anthology of favorites, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules. Awarded a MacDowell Fellowship in 2008, Tim is currently back in Iowa City, writing a new novel.

Inside Tim Johnston’s Irish Girl, readers will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance—of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark—and often darkly funny—these stories have much to offer the lover of literary  fiction as well as the reader who just loves a great story. 

Publishers Weekly

You have to read closely so as not to miss significant clues in these tightly coiled stories by Katherine Anne Porter Prize–winner Johnston (Never So Green), who ventures deeply into the consciousness of Midwesterners to unearth old tensions and buried animosities. In “Water,” he balances a marvelously multilayered plot involving a widowed mother of now grown twin boys (“one healthy, one not”) who recognizes how her protectiveness of her sons—even if one commits a horrible crime—supersedes the ties she holds to her past. “Dirt Men” finds Buddy Jr., the son of a local excavating entrepreneur, returned home in disgrace from the Colorado college where he was teaching and trapped within the intersection of his past and his hubris when the dismembered body of a woman is found in an auto salvage lot. In “Things Go Missing,” Johnston enters the mind of a young woman burglar whose seemingly senseless thefts (such as her shrink's autographed Michael Jordan poster) allows her to connect finally with someone, despite the pain she inflicts. These beautifully rendered tales deliver an emotional wallop. (Nov.)

Dirt Men 1

Water 14

Things Go Missing 33

Antlerless Hunt 53

Jumping Man 73

Lucky Gorseman 88

Up There 104

Irish Girl 124