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 California.

Praise for The Other Wife

"[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

"Thomas-Kennedy enthralls with this story about a marriage threatened by class tensions and a messy love triangle . . . Readers won't want to miss this aching and all-too-real portrayal of a woman's search for fulfillment." --Publishers Weekly

"Zuzu's life seems perfect: Her wife is a high-powered lawyer, she lives in a beautiful house full of beautiful things, and she's a full-time mom to her son Gideon. But she's restless, and when a chance comes up to see her longtime friend Cash, whom she had a crush on in college, she jumps at it. Sound like a book about the one who got away? Sure, in some ways it is. But in more ways, it's about the sometimes sustaining, sometimes destructive nature of living inside one's fantasies of what other people are like." -- NPR, "Books We Love"

"A marvelous study in how much desire lives in memory, in nostalgia and in fantasy. Fittingly for its themes, and for Zuzu, it's also one of those rare contemporary novels that allows itself to remain unresolved, on a precipice of great change, its future open wide." --The Washington Post

"When Zuzu suddenly gets called back to her hometown, she finally has a chance to take stock of what she left behind . . . Despite the weighty subject matter, this one is easy to dip in and out of between naps, chats and bodysurfing." --New York Times, "The Summer's Best Beach Reads"

"Vividly rendered. . . As a portrait of a biracial, bisexual person's discomfort in the space society allows them, the novel's lasting effect is nuanced and thought-provoking." --The Minnesota Star Tribune

"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

"A wistful tale of introspection and longing for other possibilities by a master of character development." --Bookpage

"Extraordinary. A story about belonging in liminal spaces, and longing for things seemingly just out of reach. A searing, beautiful book." --Kiley Reid, 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

"Heart-rending, funny and relatable . . . I could not put the book down." --Jessica Grose, author of Soulmates

Publisher: Riverhead Books

Pub date: 2026-07-14

Length: 304 pages