Darcey Steinke: 6 books

In this critically beloved and piercing memoir, Darcey Steinke, a minister's daughter, recounts her lifelong struggle to find religion. Though wide-eyed and accepting as a girl, Steinke left the faith in her teenage years; scene by breathtaking scene, she vividly describes the angst, embarrassment,...

It's the summer of 1972 and girlhood has never been more fraught, but Darcy Steinke captures all of it with an intimate, startling grace. When Jesse’s family moves to Roanoke, Virginia, in the summer of 1972, she’s twelve years old and already mindful of the schism between innocence and...

Mary is a new mother transformed by the birth of her baby; Walter, a lonely gay Episcopal priest, privately struggles with his contradictory desires; and John, a monk who has left his monastery after fifteen years, craves intimacy with a woman. With mesmerizing prose, Darcey Steinke weaves together...

Vanity Fair called this intensely erotic story of a young woman's sexual and psychological odyssey "a provocative tour through the dark side." Jesse, a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old, is adrift in San Francisco's demimonde of sexually ambiguous, bourbon-drinking, drug-taking outsiders. While desperately...

From one of the most daring and sensuous young writers in America, Jesus Saves, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is a suburban gothic that explores the sources of evil, confronts the dynamic shifts within theology, and traces the consequences of suburban alienation. Set in the modern launch...

The first novel from the acclaimed author of Suicide Blonde and Jesus Saves, Up Through the Water is an unusually assured and lyrical debut. Set on an island resort town in North Carolina, it tells of summer people and islanders, mothers and sons, women and men, love and its dangers. It is the story...