Thomas Grattan

Thomas Grattan writes fiction about family, displacement, class, and the meanings attached to home, and he also teaches creative writing. The Recent East, his debut, follows a mother and her two teenagers as they move from New York to the house she inherited in the former East Germany. Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought it out during 2021, and edition records style it as The Recent East: A Novel. Its multigenerational structure moves across decades, connecting one family’s unsettled relationships to German reunification and the social changes that follow. Grattan earned an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and taught middle-school English before joining Bennington College’s writing faculty. The Recent East became a New York Times editors’ choice and received recognition from debut-fiction award programs. Rather than using history as scenery alone, Grattan lets houses, inheritances, local memory, and changing borders shape the characters’ choices. His later novel In Tongues continues his interest in belonging, work, art, and self-invention.