Mary Mackey

Author Information
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  • Bibliography:
    13 Books (1 Series)
  • First Book:
    May 1986
  • Latest Book:
    May 2016
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About the Author

Mary Lou McGinness Mackey was born in 1945 in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, where she raised. She is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. From 1989 to 1992 she served of Chair of PEN American Center, West. Currently, she is a professor of English and Writer in Residence at California State University, Sacramento.

Mary Mackey published novels and books of poetry and have sold over a million and a half copies. They have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Finnish. While her poetry has mainly centered around the traditional lyric themes of love, death, and nature, her novels have ranged from the Midwestern United States to Neolithic Europe, from comedy to tragedy. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, she has sold feature scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to various independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original screenplay Silence which starred the late Will Geer and which won several awards. She has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She also writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens".

Full Series List in Order

The EarthSong Trilogy

1 - The Year the Horses Came (Sep-1993)
2 - The Horses at the Gate (Jan-1996)
3 - The Fires Of Spring (Mar-2004)

Book List in Order: 13 titles

  • A Grand Passion

    INTRIGUES YOU, SWEEPS YOU UP AND HOLDS YOU IN HIGH SUSPENSE UNTIL THE FINAL CURTAIN THREE GENERATIONS OF INESCAPABLE OBESSION Sweeping from Jazz age Paris to the golden era of Hollywood, to Moscow, London and New York, here is the glamorous a...

  • The Kindness of Strangers

  • Season of Shadows

    Bantam Fanfare

    Beginning in the early 1960’s, Season of Shadows narrates the story of a 30 year friendship between Lucy Constable and Cassandra Quinn, two college roommates who are forced to go into hiding and change their identities when Lucy flees from an abusi...

  • The Year the Horses Came

    The EarthSong Trilogy - 1

    Encountering a strange warrior on the day she is declared a woman, Marrah teaches Staven about the ways of love, and, learning about his tribe's conquering plans, journeys the to Eastern steppes to save her beloved Shore People. Reprint....

  • The Horses at the Gate

    The EarthSong Trilogy - 2

    In the year 4368 B.C., Marrah, daughter of the peace loving shore people, has fled captivity from the nomad warrior horde who have a lust for carnage and conquest that is alien to her. Across a landscape of frozen steppes and trackless forests, she ...

  • The Last Warrior Queen

    Like Jean Auel and Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mary Mackey takes us to a place where myth and reality meet. The year is 3643 B.C.E. The great matriarchal cities which have dominated the earth are about to disappear as hordes of nomads overrun the fertile ...

  • The Fires Of Spring

    The EarthSong Trilogy - 3

    In the year 4300 B.C., a young woman named Keshna comes of age as a female warrior and daring avenger. When the nomad diviner Changar kidnaps Queen Marrah's son Keru, Keshna vows to hunt Changar down, but Changar has put Keru into a trance, taken pos...

  • Breaking the Fever

    Poetry. "Most poets seem to write poetry with the will, relentlessly suppressing every part of themselves that isn't ecstatic. Mary Mackey writes as a whole person-mind and senses-and the poems are marvelous"--Dennis Nurkse. Mackey's new collection o...

  • The Notorious Mrs. Winston

    Now Mary Mackey makes a grand return with a beautifully written story set during the American Civil War, as a fierce abolitionist in a loveless marriage falls helplessly in love with a Confederate soldier... Married to an older man who sees her as...



  • The Widow's War

    In 1853, Carolyn Vinton is left alone and pregnant after her fiance, abolitionist doctor William Saylor, disappears. After his stepbrother convinces her that William is dead, Carolyn accepts his offer of marriage, not realizing that she is being draw...

  • Immersion

    Isolated in a remote field station in a tropical rainforest in the late 1960's, a young woman named Kirsten wages a desperate struggle for intellectual, spiritual, personal, and sexual liberation from her biologist husband who views her as a piece...

  • McCarthy's List

    Written in the “first person insane,” McCarthy’s List is zany, hilarious, irreverent contemplation of the madness of American culture. Rinda Sue McCarthy, born at the precise moment the atomic bomb burst over Hiroshima, sits in a Mexican jail a...

  • The Village of Bones

    Prequel to the Earthsong Series

    "Mary Mackey's The Village of Bones, gives us the vivid adventures of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the magic of The Mists of Avalon and Lord of the Rings, and the beauty of Avatar. Filled with the belief that lo...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Mary Mackey has published 13 books.

Mary Mackey does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, The Village of Bones, was published in May 2016.

The first book by Mary Mackey, A Grand Passion, was published in May 1986.

Yes. Mary Mackey has 1 series.
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