still true
By Maggie Ginsberg
Winner of the 2023 WLA Literary Award for Fiction
The Honorable Mention Selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award
2023 Book of the Year finalist from the Chicago Writer’s Association
2023 Midwest Book Awards silver medal winner, Literary/Contemporary/Historical Fiction
2023 WFWA STAR Award finalist for Outstanding Debut
One summer evening, Lib Hanson is confronted by her painful past when Matt Marlow, the forty-year-old son she abandoned as an infant, shows up on her porch. Fiercely independent, Lib has never revealed her son’s existence — or her previous marriage—to her husband, Jack. Married nearly three decades but living in separate houses (to the confusion but acceptance of their neighbors), they enjoy an ease and comfort together in small-town Anthem, Wisconsin. But Jack is a stickler for honesty, and Lib’s long-dormant secret threatens to unravel their lives.
“It’s a rare experience to feel gratitude for a book’s pleasures on nearly every page. But Maggie Ginsberg has written that book. I could stay in this story for years.” –Luis Alberto Urrea, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and bestselling author of The House of Broken Angels
Author
Maggie Ginsberg
Maggie Ginsberg is a writer, editor and author in Wisconsin. Her debut novel, Still True, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in September 2022 and won the Wisconsin Library Association’s 2023 WLA Literary Award for Fiction. It is the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, a finalist for the Chicago Writer’s Association 2023 Book of the Year, a 2023 Midwest Book Awards silver medal winner in the Literary/Contemporary/Historical Fiction category, and one of three finalists for the Women’s Fiction Writer’s Association STAR Award for Outstanding Debut.
Maggie is a senior editor at Madison Magazine, where she has worked full time since 2020 after freelancing for city, regional and national magazines since 2006. She has published hundreds of articles throughout her career, earning numerous honors from the City Regional Magazine Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Milwaukee Press Club.
She was born in Minnesota and has lived in Wisconsin since 1985.
Not since Kent Haruf have I read an author so skilled at capturing the nuance and complexity of small-town life with empathy and respect.
– Christina Clancy
author of The Second Home and Shoulder Season
Even as each of its characters curates a careful present, the shadows of the past creep up to confront them. When those realities collide, the result is troubling, affecting and deeply true.
– Jacquelyn Mitchard
bestelling author of The Deep End of the Ocean
Ginsberg’s prose is dreamy and rhapsodic and even as her characters make dreadful mistakes, she always treats them with profound decency and empathy.