KATHRYN DAVIS is the author of six previous novels, the most recent of which is The Thin Place. Her other books are Labrador, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, The Walking Tour, and Versailles. She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006 she won the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.