Author Guide ·
Books Written by
Holsinger is a medieval literature scholar at the University of Virginia who turned to fiction relatively late, writing contemporary family dramas that use a sharp, research-driven eye for institutional failure to examine how ordinary families absorb the pressures of a changing world. His novel Culpability was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2025.
By Lisanne Swart · 4 books · Contemporary Fiction · Updated August 2026
Contemporary Fiction · Oprah’s Book ClubOn my shelf
Culpability
When a family’s autonomous minivan collides with another car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is behind the wheel, and every member of the family is forced to reckon with their own hidden role in what happened, against a backdrop of a mother who is a leading AI ethicist. Selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
Holsinger uses the accident as a mechanism to interrogate a genuinely current question — as machines take over more human decisions, who is actually responsible when something goes wrong.
Contemporary Fiction
The Gifted School
Four Colorado families compete, with increasing desperation and moral compromise, to get their children into a new selective public school for gifted students, exposing the lengths modern parents will go to secure advantage for their kids.
Published just as the real-life college admissions scandal broke, leading multiple outlets to call it eerily predictive — its portrait of parental anxiety and institutional gaming still reads as sharply current.
Contemporary Fiction · Climate Fiction
The Displacements
A wealthy Miami family is displaced by the world’s first Category 6 hurricane and forced into a FEMA relocation camp alongside people whose lives look nothing like their own, exposing how differently climate disaster is experienced across class lines.
The inaugural title in the United Nations’ Read for Action Book Club — notable for imagining climate catastrophe not as a distant future but as an imminent, class-stratified present.
Historical Fiction · Thriller
A Burnable Book
Set in 1385 London, this historical thriller follows poet John Gower as he hunts for a mysterious, prophetic manuscript predicting the deaths of English kings — drawing directly on Holsinger’s own scholarly expertise in medieval literature.
Draws on Holsinger’s real academic specialty as a medievalist, giving the historical texture an authenticity that’s uncommon in the genre.
