Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| What Should Be Wild | 2018 | Buy |
| The Upstairs House | 2021 | Buy |
| Maddalena and the Dark | 2023 | Buy |
Julia Fine is a Chicago-based author of three standalone novels that mix literary fiction with gothic and fantastical elements. She earned her MFA from Columbia College Chicago and teaches creative writing at DePaul University. Her debut, What Should Be Wild (2018), follows a young woman named Maisie whose touch can kill or restore life, weaving together a modern story with centuries of dark fairy tale history. It was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Her second novel, The Upstairs House (2021), centers on a new mother who becomes convinced the ghost of children’s book author Margaret Wise Brown is haunting her baby, and won the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction.
Her third novel, Maddalena and the Dark (2023), moves to 18th-century Venice, where two girls at the Ospedale della Pieta music school form a friendship that takes on dangerous, supernatural dimensions. Antonio Vivaldi appears as a character. Across all three books, Fine returns to questions about female desire, bodily autonomy, and the fear that surrounds women’s power. Her prose leans toward the lush and atmospheric, and each novel uses its supernatural premise to get at something real: isolation, depression, obsession, and the weight of expectations placed on women.