Thomas Mullen lives a deceptively quiet life not far from downtown Atlanta. While S.U.V.s drive by and dogs bark and the locals suspect not a thing, he commits murders, spins wildly convoluted conspiracy theories, travels through time, reinvents the past, resurrects the dead, falls in love with women of his own invention, imperils young children, unleashes plagues, wages war, saves lives, dangles participles, and invents new metaphors. Most of his sentences contain verbs.

Or, if you're looking for a more official-sounding bio:

Thomas Mullen is the internationally bestselling author of eight novels, including Darktown, an NPR Best Book, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Indies Choice Book Award, and was nominated for or won prizes in France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. The follow-up, Lightning Men, was named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2017 by The New York Times and was shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award. His debut, The Last Town on Earth, was named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for excellence in historical fiction.

His works have also been named to Year’s Best lists by The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Irish Times, Kirkus Reviews, The Onion’s A/V Club, The San Diego Union-Times, Paste Magazine, and The Cleveland Plain-Dealer. His stories and essays have been published in Grantland, Paste, The Huffington Post, Atlanta Magazine, Crime Reads, LitHub, and The Bitter Southerner. He lives in Atlanta.

His new novel, The Rumor Game, will be published Feb. 27, 2024.

And because he is also the person writing this, he's now going to switch to first-person narration:

Hi! Thanks for visiting my site. And more importantly, thanks so much for reading my books.

Looking for book recommendations? The best books I read in 2023 were (in alphabetical order),

Fiction

  • The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

  • The Parked Earth by Anjali Enjeti

  • The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

  • The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

  • Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafya

  • Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper

  • Small Mercies by Dennis Lehane

  • The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

  • The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

  • The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

Non-fiction

  • Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides