“An explosive, riveting, controversial novel of sex and sexuality that looks set to be one of Atlantic Books most widely read – and talked about – books of the year.”
                                                                                                        –Atlantic Books catalog


When Suzanne rents a cabin for the summer, she is intent upon spending her days swimming in the nearby lake, and her nights alone or with occasional strangers. But her seclusion is broken when she receives a reply to a personal ad she has placed in a local paper: the letter is postmarked “Stillwater State Prison.” The letter is from a man named Alpha Breville: convict, thief, rapist.
 
Suzanne chooses to write back to Breville, but what begins as a remote correspondence quickly evolves into something much more dangerous, exciting and intimate. Simultaneously, she begins seeing an unpredictable, dark-haired drifter—a cowboy who’s part angel, part howling dog. Though the cowboy matches Suzanne in intensity and desire, he’s less faithful than the captive Breville.  

Which man can offer Suzanne the knowledge she seeks? Which man can truly touch her? How can she find her unique peace?  

In writing that has been likened to Kate Chopin’s, Maureen Gibbon constructs a taut story of desire at the other end of the Mississippi, in the north woods of Minnesota. Thief is a hard-hitting and uncompromising novel about women’s relationships with their bodies; about power, control and sex. 
      

   
Maureen Gibbon writes with a relentlessly honest voice, willing to reveal the intricate psychology of desire and redemption.  Her characters seek to reconcile the past and the self, with all the hunger and power and violence that lives within all of us.  The prose is lyric and strong, the story compelling.  The protagonist says, ‘What I felt was real and I could not walk away.’ Neither could I.
                —Chris Offutt, author of Kentucky Straight and Out of the Woods
 
Gibbon writes beautifully of the heartbreaking gulf between expectation and reality that women continue to endure, and the tragedies that await those who refuse to abide by these difficulties. It is her heroine’s refusal to be afraid, her understanding of the violence at the heart of things, her embrace of the world’s beauty, and her great conscience that save her, and inspire the reader.
                —Susanna Moore, author of The Big Girls and In the Cut

In her relentlessly compelling new novel Thief—which I read in a single sitting—Maureen Gibbon’s plainspoken, tough-minded heroine gives herself an unsentimental education... declaration of independence.
                —David Gates, author of Jernigan and The Wonders of the Invisible World