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Katie Runde

Katie Runde grew up on the Jersey Shore, where her family ran various boardwalk businesses. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and lives in Iowa City with her husband and two daughters. The Shore is her first novel.

Novels

The Shore (2022)

Katie Runde recommends

Have a Great Summer (2026)
Francesca Cocchi
"A nostalgic tribute to the landmarks and vibes of Jersey Shore, an homage to the hustle and heart it takes to run a family business, and a love story for anyone whose greatest crushes and worst heartbreaks happened on boardwalks and beaches. Cocchi's novel is a promise to any beach town local, torn between their love for their home and their big dreams, that you don't have to choose."

Welcome Home, Caroline Kline (2024)
Courtney Preiss
"Watching Caroline's hesitant, brave, and acerbically funny transformation is exactly like watching a come-from-behind victory on the ballfield: beautiful and unexpected, riveting and memorable."

Mercury (2024)
Amy Jo Burns
"Mercury pushes the family saga into a deep, rugged, beautiful territory that astonished me. This novel refuses to villainize or deify any character, but complicates and confronts the contradictory truths that everyone born into or brought into a family is heartbroken, seen deeply, misunderstood, and loved by one another, all at once. Mercury is a story to be savored and studied on a line level, but also epic in its scope and ambition. I have never read a novel that so generously and intimately reveals each and every character's deepest wants, most tender scars, and fiercest refusals to stay in the lanes our families steer us into. Burns shows, in acutely observed moments, the brutality of work and what we have to show for it at the end of the days and years of ache and labor, the realness and depth of young love hanging on through grief, the seismic changes of growing up, and how the moments we are bravest and most vulnerable change our trajectories forever."

Paper Names (2023)
Susie Luo
"Paper Names has the rare one-two punch of plot twists and sharp, absorbing prose. Luo portrays the ache of the impossible distance between parents and children, the inevitable corruption caused by wealth and privilege, the hopes, fears, and ambitions of a father navigating life in a new country, and the life-defining decisions of woman balancing her own success with sudden tragedy and long-buried truth, all while infusing each scene with a sense of deep love and longing."

Kismet (2023)
Becky Chalsen
"Kismet takes place over only a few days, but contains all the beautiful, visceral rituals of a lifetime of summer escape. Amidst the intoxicating anticipation of a wedding weekend, Chalsen crafts an absorbing, layered story of sisterhood and secrets, mistakes and miscommunication. The Fire Island backdrop infuses every scene with the golden-hour feeling of beach sunsets, the constant balm of salt air, the distant pop of glittering fireworks, and Chalsen infuses her characters with a rare grace and warmth as they navigate the unreliable memories, temptations, and disappointments that arrive along with the end of their twenties."

The House is on Fire (2023)
Rachel Beanland
"Beanland's characters must carry both their own sudden losses and contend with the collective grief of a community and the violent darkness of the era. Split second decisions in the face of danger forever alter the trajectory of so many lives - The House is on Fire is stunning in its breadth and scope of human strength and in its insistence on love amidst destruction. From fragments of half-told history, Beanland creates a world that is real, aching, dark, and true."

A Quiet Life (2022)
Ethan Joella
"A Quiet Life is about the transformative power of connection if we are willing to risk opening our hearts. Joella's characters help each other shoulder the burden of grief and unearth the shards of beauty to be found in the wreckage of loss. There is magic at the intersection of these stories, a rare and addicting alchemy of ordinary moments and choices that add up to whole, brave, flawed, joyful lives. This novel insists on our essential strength, resilience, and empathy in an age of isolation."

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