Timothy Schaffert Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters (2002)
  2. The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God (2005)
  3. Devils in the Sugar Shop (2007)
  4. The Coffins of Little Hope (2011)
  5. The Swan Gondola (2014)
  6. The Perfume Thief (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Timothy Schaffert Books Overview

The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

In Timothy Schaffert’s seriocomic debut, two sisters on the cusp of womanhood struggle to understand their father’s suicide as well as their mother’s abandonment of them many years earlier.

Lily and Mabel live on their own in their grandmother’s antique shop in rural Nebraska. They are bonded by their loyalty to each other and their haunting urgency to reconcile their own versions of the past so that they might build their futures together.

In a rebellious act, Lily steals a car with her boyfriend and heads southwest to an Arizona vineyard to confront her mother. Mabel stays behind, seeking to commune somehow with her father’s ghost.

In a story that rises out of the spare Nebraska landscape, Schaffert delivers a textured, eccentric, and redemptive tale about two young women searching for wholeness and love.

The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God

A blithe and redemptive seriocomic love story filled with country music, the ghosts of Halloween, and an ironic brand of down home religion.

Newly divorced and feeling the pain of separation from his family, Hud Smith channels his regret into writing country western songs, contemplating life on the lamb with his 8 year old daughter, and searching cryptic postcards for news of his teenage son who has run off with The Daughters of God, an alternative Gospel punk band of growing fame. Then he finds himself inching toward reconciliation with his ex, tossing his whole talent for misery into question as they head off in a borrowed school bus, hoping so very tentatively to bring the entire family together again.

In this endearing misadventure that threatens to turn out right in spite of it all, Schaffert writes a thin line between tragedy and hilarity, turning wry humor and a keen sense of the paradoxical onto characters who deserve all the tender care he gives them.

Devils in the Sugar Shop

A comical whirlwind of deception,adultery, desperation, dragqueens, stiff cocktails, nervousbreakdowns, an anonymousstalker, and suburban swingers.

The Coffins of Little Hope

Timothy Schaffert has created his most memorable character yet in Essie, an octogenarian obituary writer for her family’s small town newspaper. When a young country girl is reported to be missing, perhaps whisked away by an itinerant aerial photographer, Essie stumbles onto the story of her life. Or, it all could be simply a hoax, or a delusion, the child and child thief invented from the desperate imagination of a lonely, lovelorn woman. Either way, the story of the girl reaches far and wide, igniting controversy, attracting curiosity seekers and cult worshippers from all over the country to this dying rural town. And then it is revealed that the long awaited final book of an infamous series of ya gothic novels is being secretly printed on the newspaper s presses. The Coffins of Little Hope tells a feisty, energetic story of characters caught in the intricately woven webs of myth, legend and deception even as Schaffert explores with his typical exquisite care and sharp eye the fragility of childhood, the strength of family, the powerful rumor mills of rural America, and the sometimes dramatic effects of pop culture on the way we shape our world.

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