Claire Lombardo

Lombardo was a social worker in Chicago before the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the professional habit of watching families closely runs all through the fiction. The Most Fun We Ever Had, published in 2019, follows four adult sisters and the parents whose enduring marriage the daughters find impossible to match, moving back and forth across forty years. It ran past five hundred pages for a first novel, which publishers rarely allow, and spent months on bestseller lists anyway. Same As It Ever Was followed five years later.