Joanna Scott Books In Order

Novels

  1. Fading, My Parmacheene Belle (1987)
  2. The Closest Possible Union (1988)
  3. Arrogance (1990)
  4. The Manikin (1996)
  5. Make Believe (2000)
  6. Tourmaline (2002)
  7. Liberation (2005)
  8. Follow Me (2009)
  9. De Potter’s Grand Tour (2014)
  10. Careers for Women (2017)

Collections

  1. Various Antidotes (1994)
  2. Everybody Loves Somebody (2006)
  3. Excuse Me While I Disappear (2021)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Joanna Scott Books Overview

Fading, My Parmacheene Belle

Mourning the loss of his wife, and in a fit of rage and grief, an aged fisherman attacks his son and flees into the neighboring woods. Soon accompanied by a teenage waif, the fisherman regales the girl with tales of his beloved, his ‘Parmacheene Belle;’ muses on the modernizing world; and forges on his quixotic quest to reach his late wife’s native coast. Joanna Scott’s debut novel is one of the strangest love stories ever told, as well as an exploration into the unknown heart of our country.

The Closest Possible Union

Joanna Scott’s provocative second novel chronicles the life of the Charles Beauchamp, a slave ship, and its fourteen year old captain s apprentice, Tom. The son of the ship s owner, Tom must navigate the volatile waters of the boat s crew: a wrathful captain, a raving preacher, a dangerous messboy, and a shadowy deckhand with hidden cargo of his own. As the Charles Beauchamp makes its fateful journey across the Atlantic, Scott unfurls a hallucinatory saga that rings with a modern immediacy.

Arrogance

In Joanna Scott’s breakthrough novel the Austrian artist Egon Schiele comes to prismatic life in a narrative that defies convention, history, and identity. A self professed genius and student of August Klimt, Scott’s Schiele repeatedly challenges the boundaries of early twentieth century Europe. Thrown in jail on charges of immorality, Schiele’s Mephistophelean reputation only grows in stature until at the age of twenty eight, the artist dies in the Great Flu Pandemic. Told from a crosscurrent of voices, viewpoints and times, this stunning novel won Scott a nomination for the 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award.

The Manikin

The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the Henry Ford of Natural History, by 1917 Craxton has become America’s preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton s newest housekeeper. Part coming of age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.

Make Believe

Now in paperback: the novel, at once lyrical and compelling, hailed as the breakthrough book for one of our most intensely admired literary novelists. The world of Make Believe in which the novel immerses us is the world of Bo, a four year old orphan set adrift in a sea of strangers as he becomes the focus of a fierce custody battle between two sets of grandparents, one black and one white.

Tourmaline

This universally acclaimed novel everywhere hailed for its evocative descriptions, its compelling characters, its intricate plot transports us to Elba, an island off the northwest coast of Italy, in the mid 1950s. It is here that an American man, seduced by the wealth promised in the island’s surfeit of semiprecious Tourmaline, has traveled with his wife and four young sons, and now struggles to establish a homestead and a fortune. But the allure of one of Elba’s other treasures a bewitching local girl derails his quest and threatens to destroy his family.

Liberation

‘Deeply moving…
. Joanna Scott brilliantly captures war as seen through the innocence of a child.’ Bookpage

Adriana Nardi is only 10 years old when Allied forces occupy her lush island home during World War II, plaguing the quiet Italian village with violence and uncertainty. Amdu is a Senegalese soldier who abandons his comrades and befriends Adriana after witnessing an unspeakable act that has far reaching repercussions.

Decades later, on a commuter train bound for Penn Station, 60 year old Adriana revisits her memories of the war and her doomed relationship with Amdu, even as a present crisis threatens her life.

‘A prismatic and quietly powerful look at war…
. Scott pulls off kaleidoscopic shifts of observation with a depth of vision possessed by great writers.’ Los Angeles Times Book Review

‘Beautifully realized, exquisitely constructed, and fascinating…
. A calming and beautiful book to read for consolation, in these dingy times.’ Washington Post Book World

‘It may be about World War II, but this book is as timely as can be.’ Marie Claire

‘Scott’s voice remains one of contemporary fiction’s most eloquent and essential.’ Kirkus Reviews

Follow Me

On a summer day in 1946 Sally Werner, the precocious young daughter of hardscrabble Pennsylvania farmers, secretly accepts her cousin’s invitation to ride his new motorcycle. Like so much of what follows in Sally’s life, it’s an impulsive decision with dramatic and far reaching consequences. Soon she abandons her home to begin a daring journey of self creation, the truth of which she entrusts only with her granddaughter and namesake, six decades later. But when young Sally’s father a man she has never known enters her life and offers another story altogether, she must uncover the truth of her grandmother’s secret history.

Boldly rendered and beautifully told, in Follow Me Joanna Scott has crafted a paean to the American tradition of re invention and a sweeping saga of timeless and tender storytelling.

Various Antidotes

‘A greatly gifted and highly original artist…
Various Antidotes is purely and simply wonderful.’ The New York Times Book Review

The miraculous, transformative stories of Various Antidotes range across the world of history and science, alighting on figures both real and imaginary. The stories within are those of obsession and brilliance, of the ultimately human recognition that the world is larger than we believe it to be and that we, as figures within it, have through understanding the power to change that world. Whether through learning or madness or accident, the scientists and students within Various Antidotes expose us to the glorious blossom of the natural world.

Everybody Loves Somebody

Joanna Scott’s unparalleled gift for storytelling has inspired hyperbole from critics and her devoted fanbase, which includes some of the most preeminent writers of our time. But not since Various Antidotes, a finalist for the PEN/FaulknerAward, has she turned her talents toward short stories. At the seaside wedding of two lovers kept apart by the caprices of fate, a doting uncle looks on while his errant brother, father of the bride,struggles to free himself from a locked bathroom across town. A young woman arrives in Jazz Age New York with stars in her eyes and a few coins in her pocket and after a string of failed jobs, she thinks she’s found salvation in a romance with her boss at a local greasy spoon but learns that her idea of herself and others’ideas of her are quite different. A bright business man seems content with all the trappings his good fortune affords, until a flat tire and a chance encounter with a couple of mechanics in the country upsets his entire view. Here Joanna Scott offers a group of tales that celebrate her acknowledged sense of character, plot and her gift for capturing the breathtaking tension even in life’s quietest moments.

Related Authors

Leave a Comment