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Tim Johnston

Tim Johnston is the authorof the novel Descent, the story collection Irish Girl, and the Young Adult novel Never So Green. Published in 2009, the stories of Irish Girl won an O. Henry Prize, the New Letters Award for Writers, and the Gival Press Short Story Award, while the collection itself won the 2009 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction. In 2005 the title story, Irish Girl, was included in the David Sedaris anthology of favorites, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules.

Genres: Mystery, Literary Fiction, Young Adult Fiction

Novels

   Never So Green (2002)
   Descent (2015)
   The Current (2019)
   Distant Sons (2023)

Collections

Irish Girl (2009)

Tim Johnston recommends

Necessary Deeds (2024)
Mark Wish
"What makes Necessary Deeds so irresistible and addictive is that it's a devilishly inventive murder mystery presented in the finest of sentences and filtered through a mind wonderfully beset at every turn by the dark truths of human desire, ambition, envy, and jealousy--but most of all by love itself."

An Honest Man (2023)
Michael Koryta
"A macabre ghost ship adrift off the coast of Maine, a nest of islanders bristling with dark history, an ex-con/prodigal son and a lone cop allied against a depraved criminal network, a boy on the run from violence who must shelter a young woman who seems to have emerged from the sea itself - all woven together so deftly, and with such intensity of feeling, that the reader must simply hang on as the waves keep coming - and man do they come. An Honest Man is one hell of a ride, and Michael Koryta is a master at the helm."

Silent Winds, Dry Seas (2021)
Vinod Busjeet
"This story of one young man's heart-wrenching—and often hilarious—journey from a colonial island steeped in ancient culture and customs to 1970's Connecticut, is rendered in a voice so wholly authentic—so wryly observant, so quietly intelligent and poetic, so intensely alive—that you cannot say at what point you have become completely addicted to it, only that you have. Busjeet's narrator, Vishnu, is a bona fide literary creation, and Silent Winds, Dry Seas feels like discovery: wonderfully fresh and new at the outset, profoundly accomplished and wise in the end. You will not forget the experience of the first time you read this brilliant novel."

You Were Made for This (2018)
Michelle Sacks
"You Were Made For This is a thrilling literary fairytale from which you can't escape, not even after you've found your way back to the light of day. The warning is right there in the novel's epigraph: 'You must always go carefully into the dark Swedish woods.' And then in you go, forgetting to leave bread crumbs behind you, until soon you are lost in Sacks' fascinating domestic dreamscape, a dark and deceptive place where old wounds, secrets, and the seeds of violence are cooked up and jarred and stowed in plain sight, yet fill your heart with dread at every turn."

The Brightest Sun (2018)
Adrienne Benson
"This novel transported me from my safe little house in Iowa to a place where lions and hyenas prowl, where blood soaks into the parched earth and where a seedling can consume a living tree and become its own hollow tree with space enough for a grown woman to crawl into. The book throbs with descriptions of the natural world that are so beautifully wrought that their thematic significance seems essential and, at some extra-sensory level, magical. And yet what's most exciting about this story is how, in the midst of so much beauty and wildness and violence-at the dark and quiet center of it, you might say-Benson illuminates human emotion and psychology with such accuracy that you are brought home again, almost dizzily, to your own recognizable heart. That is beautiful storytelling, and this is a beautiful novel."

Watch Me Disappear (2017)
Janelle Brown
"This is a story you simply don’t want to end - but then, lord, what an ending!"

Security (2016)
Gina Wohlsdorf
"Terrifying, sexy, dizzying, and impossible to look away from."

The Passenger (2016)
Lisa Lutz
"At the outset of The Passenger, Lutz's narrator knows that her only chance for freedom is to lose herself, and thus, leaving one dead man behind, she hits the diamond lane of America?and storytelling?with a carload of identities, including the reader, who is carried along as both passenger and pursuer. This tenacious and resourceful heroine will keep you chasing, rooting, lip-biting, and above all reading until you reach the ending you never saw coming. My advice: buckle up."

Dodgers (2016)
Bill Beverly
"Reading Dodgers is like having the veil lifted from your eyes: the world is more vivid, more intense, more exquisite, and more terrifying than you ever knew. Bill Beverly is a conjurer, a poet of the dark arts, and his novel is a spell: when he sends his young drug-world protagonist on a deadly errand in the alien landscape east of L.A.—that fat swath of America known to him only by its names and its shapes on maps—it is you who makes the journey, who is the stranger in a strange land, a watcher who now feels the eyes of others wherever you go, and who must pay the devastating tolls of crossing boundaries. Hypnotic, breath-taking, bruising, beautiful, important, true—choose your adjectives, this is a great novel."

More recommendations

Books containing stories by Tim Johnston

Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005)
edited by
David Sedaris

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