Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| She’s Come Undone | 1992 |
| I Know This Much Is True | 1998 |
| The Hour I First Believed | 2008 |
| Wishin’ and Hopin’ | 2009 |
| We Are Water | 2013 |
| I’ll Take You There | 2016 |
| The River Is Waiting | 2025 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters | 2003 |
| I’ll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison | 2007 |
About Wally Lamb
Wally Lamb is an American novelist, born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1950, known for “She’s Come Undone”, “I Know This Much Is True” and “The River Is Waiting”, each of which was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club. Several of his novels are set in Three Rivers, a fictional Connecticut town based on Norwich and its neighbours.
Lamb grew up in a working-class Catholic family; his father was a superintendent in the city’s gas department. He holds a BA and an MA in education from the University of Connecticut and an MFA in writing from Vermont College. For 25 years he taught English and writing at Norwich Free Academy, the high school he had attended, where he set up the Writing Center. From 1997 to 1999 he was an associate professor at the University of Connecticut and its director of creative writing.
He began writing in 1981, the year he became a father, and his first stories ran in Northeast, the Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant. “She’s Come Undone” (1992), the story of Dolores Price, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club in December 1996. “I Know This Much Is True” (1998) concerns identical twin brothers, Dominick and Thomas Birdsey, one of whom has paranoid schizophrenia. It was an Oprah selection in June 1998 and, like its predecessor, reached number one on the bestseller lists. HBO adapted it in 2020 as a six-part miniseries directed by Derek Cianfrance, with Mark Ruffalo playing both brothers in a performance that won him an Emmy.
“The Hour I First Believed” (2008) weaves in real events such as the Columbine High School shooting and the Iraq War. “Wishin’ and Hopin’” (2009), a short comic novel about a fifth grader at a parochial school in 1964, became a Lifetime television film in 2014, and its characters return in “I’ll Take You There” (2016). “We Are Water” (2013) goes back to Three Rivers.
From 1999 to 2019 Lamb ran a writing programme for women held at York Correctional Institution, Connecticut’s only women’s prison. He edited two collections of their autobiographical writing, “Couldn’t Keep It to Myself” and “I’ll Fly Away”. His most recent novel, “The River Is Waiting” (2025), is about a young father facing the possibility of atonement after a tragedy.
Photo: Wes Washington, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).