Best Seller
Loading
Dear Thorns
Ebook
Published on Nov 03, 2026 | 280 Pages
“A deft, persuasive depiction of an appealing mind in midlife.”—Kirkus Reviews
For fans of Dana Spiotta’s Wayward and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies we follow Lora, a wildlife refuge worker in South Texas who gets tangled up in a romantic relationship with a much younger male intern.
Lora has worked at the wildlife refuge in South Texas for seven years, trapping and studying the elusive Texas ocelot. Interns come and go, but when Ben arrives, something is awakened in Lora that has long been dormant.
As Lora and Ben track the beautiful, almost mystical animal, tensions arise on the refuge. Lora’s boss strategizes about how to turn part of the refuge into a hunting destination; an eccentric artist and rancher pitches an unconventional scheme to help the ocelots; and Lora and Ben make a series of impulsive, inappropriate choices. Along the way, the reader learns about Lora’s professional and romantic history—the story of a woman dedicated to her career—and is immersed in the world of the ranchlands just above the Texas-Mexico border, home to a distinct mix of species: animal, plant, and human.
With sharp prose and subtle humor, critically-acclaimed writer Karen Olsson mines the gulf between youth and middle age and reckons with the ecological disaster of species loss. Her novel illuminates how the things we do to wild animals—isolating them, reducing their habitats, disconnecting them from other groups—are all things we seem to do to ourselves. Brainy, elegant, and deeply engrossing, Dear Thorns is a portrait of a woman’s idealism in a compromised world.
For fans of Dana Spiotta’s Wayward and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies we follow Lora, a wildlife refuge worker in South Texas who gets tangled up in a romantic relationship with a much younger male intern.
Lora has worked at the wildlife refuge in South Texas for seven years, trapping and studying the elusive Texas ocelot. Interns come and go, but when Ben arrives, something is awakened in Lora that has long been dormant.
As Lora and Ben track the beautiful, almost mystical animal, tensions arise on the refuge. Lora’s boss strategizes about how to turn part of the refuge into a hunting destination; an eccentric artist and rancher pitches an unconventional scheme to help the ocelots; and Lora and Ben make a series of impulsive, inappropriate choices. Along the way, the reader learns about Lora’s professional and romantic history—the story of a woman dedicated to her career—and is immersed in the world of the ranchlands just above the Texas-Mexico border, home to a distinct mix of species: animal, plant, and human.
With sharp prose and subtle humor, critically-acclaimed writer Karen Olsson mines the gulf between youth and middle age and reckons with the ecological disaster of species loss. Her novel illuminates how the things we do to wild animals—isolating them, reducing their habitats, disconnecting them from other groups—are all things we seem to do to ourselves. Brainy, elegant, and deeply engrossing, Dear Thorns is a portrait of a woman’s idealism in a compromised world.
On Tour
Author
Karen Olsson
Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo, which was a runner-up for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and All the Houses, as well as the nonfiction work The Weil Conjectures. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Bookforum, and Texas Monthly, among other publications, and she was an editor of The Texas Observer. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics and lives in Austin, Texas with her family.
Learn More about Karen Olsson
