Joan Thomas’s first novel, Reading by Lightning, won the Amazon First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book, and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Curiosity, her second, was also nominated for the IMPAC Award and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, while her third, The Opening Sky, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2014, she received the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Prize for a writer in mid-career. Her latest novel, Five Wives (HarperCollins), is based on the lives of five women left behind in the rainforest of Ecuador when their missionary husbands are killed. Thomas lives in Winnipeg.
