Chris Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, holds an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and a Ph.D. from UNL, where she has taught courses in writing and literature. She has worked as a quality assurance overseer at a condom factory, a jar-lid screwer at a plastics plant, a closer at Burger King, a record store clerk, an all-ages club manager, and a PR writer. PICKARD COUNTY ATLAS is her first novel.

From the New Yorker, on PICKARD COUNTY ATLAS: “This atmospheric début thriller is set in the late nineteen-seventies in small-town Nebraska, a landscape littered with rundown double-wides and populated with ‘chain-smoking squatters drinking Cutty Sark from gallon jugs.’ The taut plot concerns the fallout from the murder of a young boy eighteen years earlier, and family traumas that link a deputy sheriff to the victim’s surviving brothers—one a suspected arsonist, the other a speed addict. It culminates in an incendiary sequence that pits prolonged anguish against the need for new beginnings.”