Wally Lamb Books In Order

She’s Come Undone

‘Mine is a story of craving: an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered…
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Meet Dolores Price. She’s 13, wise mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Beached like a whale in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallmomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally rolls into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she’s determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before really going belly up.

In this extraordinary coming of age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical hero*ine to come along in years. At once a fragile girl and a hard edged cynic, so tough to love yet so inimitably lovable, Dolores is as poignantly real as our own imperfections. She’s Come Undone includes a promise: you will never forget Dolores Price.

I Know This Much Is True

With his stunning debut novel, ‘She’s Come Undone, ‘ Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one womans painful yet triumphant journey of self discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with ‘I Know This Much Is True,’ a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you’re the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands the little inconvenience of the look alike corpse at your feet. And if you’re into both survival of the fittest and being your brother’s keeper if you’ve promised your dying mother them say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman’s gap toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey’s entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a split and polish ex Navy man the five foot six inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in thespare room and built submarines at night, and their long suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother’s watchful ‘monkey’; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother’s gentle ‘bunny.’ From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness and ultimately self protection in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. ‘I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness pounced on it. Out of self preservation I hid my fear’, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn’t get it. But Dominick’s talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick’s lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily’s Mount Etna, where his ambitiousand vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather’s handwritten memoir, ‘The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.’ Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico’s fablelike tale in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep becomes the old man’s confession an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truths of Domenico’s life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestor’s; transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity’s deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, ‘I Know This Much Is True‘ is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.

The Hour I First Believed

When high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his wife, Maureen, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, while Caelum is away, Maureen finds herself in the library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed. Miraculously, she survives. But when Caelum and Maureen flee to an illusion of safety on the Quirk family’s Connecticut farm, they discover that the effects of chaos are not easily put right.

While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers five generations’ worth of diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in his family’s house. As unimaginable secrets emerge, Caelum grapples with the past and struggles to fashion a future from the ashes of tragedy. His quest for meaning is at once mythic and contemporary, personal and quintessentially American.

Wishin’ and Hopin’

It’s 1964 and ten year old Felix is sure of a few things: the birds and the bees are puzzling, television is magical, and this is one Christmas he’ll never forget. LBJ and Lady Bird are in the White House, Meet the Beatles is on everyone’s turntable, and Felix Funicello distant cousin of the iconic Annette! is doing his best to navigate fifth grade easier said than done when scary movies still give you nightmares and you bear a striking resemblance to a certain adorable cartoon boy. Back in his beloved fictional town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, with a new cast of endearing characters, Wally Lamb takes his readers straight into the halls of St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School where Mother Filomina’s word is law and goody two shoes Rosalie Twerski is sure to be minding everyone’s business. But grammar and arithmetic move to the back burner this holiday season with the sudden arrivals of substitute teacher Madame Frechette, straight from Qu bec, and feisty Russian student Zhenya Kabakova. While Felix learns the meaning of French kissing, cultural misunderstanding, and tableaux vivants, Wishin’ and Hopin’ barrels toward one outrageous Christmas. From the Funicello family’s bus station lunch counter to the elementary school playground with an uproarious stop at the Pillsbury Bake Off, Wishin’ and Hopin’ is a vivid slice of 1960s life, a wise and witty holiday tale that celebrates where we’ve been and how far we’ve come.

Couldn’t Keep it to Myself

A collection of heart wrenching tales of abuse and violence from a writing class of women prisoners, edited by world renowned no.1 New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb. Wally Lamb’s writing has been lauded around the world for its humanity and sensitivity to the plight of the outsider, the misunderstood figure who seeks hope and redemption. For the past several years, Lamb has devoted himself passionately to working with a group of incarcerated women at the York Correctional Institution. While at first the women distrusted Lamb, each other, and themselves, many of them began to slowly embrace the opportunity to join Lamb’s writing class. Over time, they began to express themselves, and this book is the product of that journey into expression. Many of these women were imprisoned by their circumstances even before they came to York. Some women recount harrowing tales of chronic abuse and rejection by their families, their peers, and their societies. Brenda Medina joins a gang to fit in and to impress her volatile boyfriend, and violence soon ensues. Nancy Birkla is arrested for drug trafficking just when she has begun the painful ascent toward sobriety and toward facing her demons. Other tales give glimpses into life in jail. Robin Cullen writes about the difficulty of celebrating Christmas in a maximum security prison where no care packages are allowed. Bonnie Foreshaw tells of how much she misses the music and joy of family gatherings. She still has much more time to serve of her forty five year sentence for an accidental killing. The reader learns why some women turned to brutal violence, how others were caught in no win situations, and how many of the women embrace hope even in the depths of their despair and loneliness. Wally Lamb’s powerful introduction describes the incredible process by which these women found their true voices, and how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow writer: ‘I have come to know my current students not merely as the substance abusers, gang members, thieves, and killers they have been, but also as the complex and creative works in progress they are.’ Couldn’t Keep it to Myself is a book about the hope and heartache of that process of finding onself and striving for a better day.

I’ll Fly Away

In 2003 Wally Lamb the author of two of the most beloved novels of our time, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True published Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, a collection of essays by the students in his writing workshop at the maximum security York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only prison for women. Writing, Lamb discovered, was a way for these women to confront painful memories, face their fears and their failures, and begin to imagine better lives. The New York Times described the book as ‘Gut tearing tales…
the unvarnished truth.’ The Los Angeles Times said of it, ‘Lying next to and rising out of despair, hope permeates this book.’

Now Lamb returns with I’ll Fly Away, a new volume of intimate, searching pieces from the York workshop. Here, twenty women eighteen inmates and two of Lamb’s cofacilitators share the experiences that shaped them from childhood and that haunt and inspire them to this day. These portraits, vignettes, and stories depict with soul baring honesty how and why women land in prison and what happens once they get there. The stories are as varied as the individuals who wrote them, but each testifies to the same core truth: the universal value of knowing oneself and changing one’s life through the power of the written word.