Mary Beth Keane

Her third novel, Ask Again, Yes debuted at No. 5 on The New York Times Best Sellers list in June 2019. Additionally, in 2019 Keane won the Tonight Show Summer Reads contest, and in August she appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to discuss the book.

Ask Again, Yes was selected as The Tonight Show Summer Reads choice for 2019 after five days of audience voting that garnered nearly a million votes. Keane won the NAIBA 2019 Award for Best Fiction, and she was a finalist for the 2019 Goodread's Choice Award Best Fiction.

Raised Catholic, Keane wrote an essay for Vogue Magazine in 2018, about her decision to leave the Catholic Church.

Her second novel, Fever, a fictional retelling of the life of Typhoid Mary, was listed as one of the New York Times Editor's Choice novels in March 2013.

Mary Beth Keane is an American writer of Irish parentage. She is the author of The Walking People (2009), Fever (2013), and Ask Again, Yes (2019). In 2011 she was named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35," and in 2015 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction.

Keane's first novel, The Walking People, published in 2009, chronicles the life of two sisters who leave their small Irish village for New York.

In 2001, Keane was hired as a receptionist at a New York literary agency, where she met her agent.

Keane graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University, with a B.A. in English Literature in 1999. She later attended the University of Virginia, where she earned her M.F.A. in Fiction in 2005.