Jackie Thomas-Kennedy was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in 2014. She is the winner of the 2019 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize, and her work has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. Her stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her wife and their family.

"[An] original love story that paints a compelling and real picture of how our minds pinball through time, seeking in the present some of the thrill and love and validation of old patterns...We would follow Zuzu anywhere." --Oprah Daily

"Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book." --Kiley Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Come and Get It

"A probing, gorgeous novel about the intricacies of desire: for other loves, other lives, other versions of the self...a remarkable debut." --Kirsten Valdez Quade, author of The Five Wounds

"Humor! Verve! Soul! This novel has it all...The Other Wife sounds and feels both classic and like nothing I've encountered before. --Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of Housemates

"Tender, wise, and thoroughly compelling, The Other Wife teems with the complicated pleasures and desolations of longing. Jackie Thomas-Kennedy knows a great deal about the life-shaping strength of desire." --R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

"Captures the dizzy angst of young romance so well that it felt like Jackie Thomas-Kennedy had a surveillance camera in my college dorm room...Following Zuzu over decades as she navigates growing up is a heart-rending, funny and relatable journey. I could not put the book down.
--Jessica Grose, author of Soulmates

"Rich in Zuzu's lifelike conversations and interiority, Thomas-Kennedy's debut is a humbly expansive marriage story and a tale of growing older in lockstep with a version of yourself that gets to stay young." --Booklist

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Pub date: 2025-07-15

Length: 304 pages