Books by chris lombardi

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Jehanne Darc draws on the historical record to create a vivid, lyrical present-tense narrative of women at war. The first volume of a trilogy, Book One takes Jehanne Darc (later known as Jeanne d’Arc) from her origins to her first victory, at Orléans. Born toward the end of the Hundred Years’ War, Jehanne Darc became a child soldier at sixteen, propelled by a set of voices she came to call the voice of God. Readers see her transformation from farm girl to a young soldier with magical powers and meet her wealthy and powerful ally, the king’s mother-in-law Yolande d’Aragon, "Queen of Four Kingdoms" (Aragon, Sicily, Cyprus, and Jerusalem). Together they marshal armies, seeking to liberate Orleans from its English occupiers. Jehanne Darc is a Joan of Arc readers haven’t seen before: traumatized by war, gender-defying, and magical in all the right ways. A superhero for our troubling times. 

PRAISE FOR Jehanne Darc

"The Maid of Orleans rises from the trauma of war in Lombardi’s historical novel, the first in a series.

"Domrémy, 1424: Most families have left this war-torn village, but not the Darcs, the wealthiest tenant farmers in the area. When English soldiers raid the town, the Darcs’ 12-year-old daughter Jehanne is brutally gang-raped. Afterward, she begins to experience otherworldly fits and visions: “Whispers fill her head, whispered voices of other girls, other boys, all pushed to the ground by soldiers and discarded in pieces. Some of the voices are not speaking French, the words thicker, more glottal, odd music of tones and angles.” After three years of these phenomena, the voices give her an assignment to join the army of the Dauphin—the heir to the throne—to help him unite all of France. ... Lombardi’s interpretation of Jehanne captures both the surreality of religious mysticism and the madness-inducing violence of the period. ... Rooting Jehanne’s story in sexual trauma adds a disruptive dimension to this famous history, one that the reader will be intrigued to see developed in subsequent volumes. A bold, lyrical reimagining of the Joan of Arc story."

          —Kirkus Reviews (GET IT) 

“That crossbow could not silence the voice of God!” declares young Jehanne Darc, the 'peasant girl in boy-doublet' of 15th-century France whose visions, piety, and leadership changed the course of history. Lombardi (author of blue: season, among other titles) brings that history to urgent life in this fascinating, at times harrowing look at the life of the epochal seer and soldier, from a horrifying rape by English soldiers at age 12 to her triumphant victory in the siege of Orléans at 17 years old. With intense focus, Lombardi interrogates and illuminates the mind of this girl “crawling home from the sheep meadow onto a horse and into white armor,” facing uncertainty over whether “the jammed voices filling her ears” are “not madness but God.”

Lombardi dramatizes events and complex states of mind with such swift richness that readers will feel fully immersed in the life of this saint-to-be, a young woman whose bold proclamations—those moments when “her angels push through her tongue”—can shock even herself. ... Readers of historical fiction that captures not just what happened in the past but how it felt to live it will relish this exploration of the well-known story, rendered in sharp-yet-poetic present-tense prose that gallops along even as it reveals a Jehanne who “doesn’t know if that’s her thoughts, saying it, or the toothless murmur of an angel.”

Takeaway: Exhilarating novel illuminating the mind of France’s young girl saint.

Comparable Titles: Nicola Griffith’s Hild; Hilary Mantel."

          —Publishers Weekly (Editor's choice)

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A literary mystery, set in the 1990s: How did Molly, a promising musician and graduate student, end up in a Baltimore psychiatric hospital calling herself Lucia? Readers unravel the clues as hospital scenes alternate with Molly's journals. A story about memory, trauma, and Lucia Joyce -- the daughter of Irish writer James Joyce, who died in 1982 in the Swiss mental hospital where she'd lived for more than 40 years. For fans of The Secret History and The Archivist, as well as Girl, Interrupted. 

PRAISE FOR blue: season

"Lombardi’s sprawling novel is an intense, well-observed portrait of a psychiatric patient and the obsessions that slowly undermine her sanity; an engrossing picture of literary sleuthing; a cri de coeur against intimate predations; and a moving depiction of a family torn by ugly secrets. The author’s prose has a vivid immediacy, whether she’s registering intense emotion—“How can you breathe when your lungs keep collapsing on you, like the emphysema of some five-pack-a-day smoker?” wonders Molly after a lover blithely dumps her—or a reflective lyricism. (A patient “walked alongside Molly, speaking softly to her; as they passed under the weeping willow trees Molly’s face was childlike, upturned, her slow movements for once acquiring something resembling grace.”) The result is a very Joycean exploration of a troubled psyche revealed in evocative prose.

"A richly textured and deeply felt tale of life and tragedy turned into art."

          —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) 

"As it traces a brilliant young woman’s path into psychosis, blue: season’s supple prose mixes poetry with delirium, finding truth in delusion. The novel as it intensifies carries you deep into madness and then back out."

          —Louis B. Jones, author of Radiance and Particles and Luck

"I am blown away. A voicing of silent voices on so many levels. The marathon running was such a fascinating counterpoint/thread. Really brilliant. And deserves to be read by others!! Completely away from the deeper truths of the book, it made me realize that academia has changed in the past 20 years more than madhouses."

          —David Hyman, Professor of English, Lehman College

"…a highly original book, at once scholarly and intimate."

          —Eric Jaffe, author of A Curious Madness: An American Combat Psychiatrist, 

             a Japanese War Crimes Suspect, and an Unsolved Mystery from World War II 

"Lucia Joyce's sudden fall from celebrated dancer to confinement in a mental asylum confounded her psychiatrist Carl Jung and left an unsolved family mystery. Chris Lombardi's blue: season finds clues in the uncanny terrain shared by James Joyce's radiant genius and his daughter's banished speech diagnosed as schizophrenia. This fascinating, thriller-paced novel avoids both the casual pathologization of madness or its equally misleading romanticization, and reveals the common bond between artistic genius and suffering patient. Readers familiar with Joyce or discovering him for the first time will find in Lombardi's, richly written, intricate book a compassionate exploration of the literary heart of madness, offering new insights into what it means to be human."

          —Will Hall, author of Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness,

             co-founder, Hearing Voices Network USA

Chris Lombardi's fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize and won both the Lowell DeJur Prize and the Germaine Griffin Moore Prize at City College of New York. Lombardi's also a veteran journalist and advocate, and author of the nonfiction I Ain't Marching Anymore (New Press, 2020). Lombardi’s fiction has been published in minnesota review, Anything That Moves, Lurch, The Pearl, Living Room, and assorted anthologies, including  Hey, Paesan! Lesbians and Gays of Italian Descent. Her journalism has been published by The Nation, Ms. Magazine, Poets & Writers, Women's Enews, ABA Journal, American Book Review and Inside MS. Her novel The Suicide Project was one of 12 finalists for Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize.