HOW WILL I KNOW YOU? —People Magazine's Book of the Week

"Jessica Treadway draws her characters into an impossible knot and then expertly teases it apart. The question of what really happened to Joy kept me up half the night." —Ann Patchett, bestselling author of The Dutch House

"Treadway combines intense suspense with a smart take on 21st-century adolescence, parenting and justice."

— People Magazine

"Thoughtful mystery... nuanced, probing, and honest." -- Kirkus Reviews

LACY EYE

"Deftly plotted psychological thriller… Treadway paints a devastating portrait of a family torn apart from both the outside and within."
-- Publishers Weekly

"An excellent exploration of the agony that often accompanies parenthood." —Kirkus Review

"An intricately plotted psychological thriller." —The Chicago Tribune

"Great characters, a smart plot, full of heart and feeling." — The London Sunday Mirror

"Ominous... intrigue behind every glance and unfinished sentence." —Booklist

PLEASE COME BACK TO ME

Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

"Each of the stories exposes a darker side of American family life, with hidden fault lines of contradiction lurking in the human soul." —The Rumpus

"Treadway's prose is clear and searingly direct. She tells her stories without flash or florid embellishments. But the little insights and illuminating details are all the more vivid in their spare dryness." —The Boston Globe

AND GIVE YOU PEACE

Booklist's Top Ten Debut Novels of the Year

"A stunning exploration of a family's devastating loss." — Booklist

"I know of few authors who can write with the intelligence, sensitivity, and grace of Jessica Treadway. I know of none who can write with such courage. And Give You Peace teaches us how—and why—to look at what we're afraid to see. We emerge redeemed." —Elizabeth Berg, bestselling author of The Confession Club and I'll Be Seeing You: a Memoir

ABSENT WITHOUT LEAVE

John C. Zacharis First Book Award

"Jessica Treadway's fiction takes us into the terrifying and mystifying truths of family life. This is the real thing: how it can go wrong, how it can be redeemed. There's no sentimentality here, just honesty, faith, and the glorious transformations of literary art."

—Christopher Tilghman, author of In a Father's Place

Jessica Treadway

Books

Infinite Dimensions

Infinite Dimensions

In Infinite Dimensions, her first collection after winning the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway writes about the themes of fidelity, betrayal, and self-delusion as she portrays what William Faulkner called "the human heart in conflict with itself." Treadway mines the internal landscapes of her characters as they try but often fail to live up to their own standards of integrity. A female bank executive with a history of psychiatric illness is forced to decide whether to hire her former hospital roommate, whom she fears will expose her past. A college student discovers the benefits and costs of plagiarizing a paper. A recovering alcoholic faces the prospect of self-sabotage during a dinner meeting with an editor who can make or break her career. The stories are loosely linked by the motif of a fictional fabulist writer and her most famous story, about a Russian housewife whose sugar bowl interrogates her regularly about her moral life.

"Jessica Treadway's intense and moving stories are connected by an intriguing thread, yet each one stands alone as a gem of intuition and empathy. This is a stellar collection." —Hilma Wolitzer, author of Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket

"What an exquisite gift Jessica Treadway has given readers with her latest short-story collection, Infinite Dimensions. A masterclass in the story form, Treadway's riveting collection awakens us to the marvel of our ordinary lives, even as it demonstrates how little it takes to shatter them…. This book is simply astonishing." —E.J. Levy, author of The Cape Doctor and Love, in Theory

The Gretchen Question

The Gretchen Question recounts a day in the life of Roberta Chase, who does not have much time left to make peace with the son who's punishing her for withholding his father's true identity. A single mother torn between protecting her only child or revealing herself fully to the people she loves most, Roberta finds herself at war with conflicting loyalties, the increasing betrayal by her own body, the confused love she feels for her oldest friend, and a trauma from her past that casts a deep and possibly permanent shadow not only over her own life, but over the legacy she will bestow upon her son. Portraying the most intense and even shameful moments of motherhood, and the things we leave unsaid even to those we want most to hear them, the novel is also a celebration of one woman's private reckoning with the source of her life's most profound pain―as well as its greatest pleasure.

"A thoughtful, and thought-provoking, meditation on love, loss, and legacy."

—Kirkus Reviews

"Treadway powerfully captures one woman's attempt to live a meaningful existence despite all that she has endured."

—Publishers Weekly

"The Gretchen Question is a powerful and emotional ride with disorienting, satisfying turns and a stunning end. Treadway is masterful." —Lily King, author of Euphoria and Writers & Lovers

"Absolutely spellbinding, utterly deceptive in its brevity, Jessica Treadway's new novel packs into a single day of a single life one of the most haunting stories I have ever read about the price we pay for the secrets we keep. It is also about friendship, motherhood, mortality, the meaning of work, and the search for lasting love: yes, all of that. Open it now." —Julia Glass, National Book Award winning author of Three Junes.