Katie Runde grew up on the Jersey Shore, where her family ran various boardwalk businesses. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters. The Shore is her first novel.
Katie Runde recommends
Welcome Home, Caroline Kline (2024)
Courtney Preiss
"Watching Caroline's hesitant, brave, and acerbically funny transformation is exactly like watching a come-from-behind victory on the ballfield: beautiful and unexpected, riveting and memorable."
Mercury (2024)
Amy Jo Burns
"Mercury pushes the family saga into a deep, rugged, beautiful territory that astonished me. This novel refuses to villainize or deify any character, but complicates and confronts the contradictory truths that everyone born into or brought into a family is heartbroken, seen deeply, misunderstood, and loved by one another, all at once. Mercury is a story to be savored and studied on a line level, but also epic in its scope and ambition. I have never read a novel that so generously and intimately reveals each and every character's deepest wants, most tender scars, and fiercest refusals to stay in the lanes our families steer us into. Burns shows, in acutely observed moments, the brutality of work and what we have to show for it at the end of the days and years of ache and labor, the realness and depth of young love hanging on through grief, the seismic changes of growing up, and how the moments we are bravest and most vulnerable change our trajectories forever."
Paper Names (2023)
Susie Luo
"Paper Names has the rare one-two punch of plot twists and sharp, absorbing prose. Luo portrays the ache of the impossible distance between parents and children, the inevitable corruption caused by wealth and privilege, the hopes, fears, and ambitions of a father navigating life in a new country, and the life-defining decisions of woman balancing her own success with sudden tragedy and long-buried truth, all while infusing each scene with a sense of deep love and longing."
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