Karen Olsson

Author Karen Olsson comes to The Wild Detectives to discuss her new novel All the Houses (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015). Karen will be joined in conversation with Rebecca Beegle.

After her father has a heart attack and subsequent surgery, Helen Atherton returns to her hometown of Washington, D.C., to help take care of him and, perhaps more urgently, to heal her own wounds. Intertwining a family story and a story of the Iran-Contra scandal, All The Houses is a sharply observed, heartfelt novel about the strangeness of life in the nation’s capital.

Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo (Picador, 2006) and All the Houses. She has written about politics, science, and popular culture for magazines including The New York Times Magazine and Texas Monthly, where she is a contributing editor. She is also a former editor of The Texas Observer. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., she now lives in Austin, Texas, with her family.