I decided last month to take a look at my auto buy authors. You know the ones, your ride or die authors whose books you know will deliver. If you want to look at my criteria and read about my first auto buy author, Thomas H. Cook, you can visit that post here.

This month’s auto buy author is another Thomas: Thomas Christopher Greene.

Thomas Christopher Greene is an American writer and co-founder and past president of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He’s the author of seven books, of which I have read four. There’s a great interview with him here.

My first experience with Greene was back in 2011 when I read his novel Envious Moon. About that book I said: “Love is the one emotion that drives people, especially young people, to reckless behaviour. Greene’s novel captures that love-fueled momentum and propels Anthony, Hannah and the reader on a journey that is both heart-felt and heart-breaking.”

Like I said in my review, I am a sucker for star-crossed lovers or any book that taps into angsty longing and Envious Moon had that in spades, so of course I was going to seek out more books by this author.

Here’s what I’ve read:

The Headmaster’s Wife: One of the delights of this books (if you can actually call a novel about grief ‘delightful’) is letting the pieces of this puzzle click together in their own time. This is a book that sort of reads like a mystery, but isn’t that what life is at the end of the day? An unfathomable mystery. I read it in one sitting.

The Perfect Liar: Max W. and Susannah meet at a fancy art party in New York City. They are drawn to each other almost immediately and soon after, they are married. Now they live in Vermont where Max has taken a job as a lecturer at a small liberal arts college. One morning, while Max is away giving a lecture at an art institute in Chicago, Susannah discovers a note pinned to their front door: I KNOW WHO YOU ARE. Couldn’t put it down.

If I Forget You: The novel opens in 2012. Henry, a poet and lecturer at NYU, sees Margot – for the first time in 20 years – on the street in Manhattan. When their eyes meet, “the face Henry sees travels to him from a lifetime ago.” Instead of speaking to him, though, she runs away. It is from this point that their story unspools – toggling between their college days and this point in the present. Lives lived and all that.

Greene seems to walk that line that I love so much between page turner and literature, often with a heaping helping of angst thrown in.

I still have some Greene books to look forward to: Mirror Lake, After the Rain, I’ll Never be Long Gone, and Notes from the Porch: Tiny True Stories to Make You Feel Better About the World. I can’t wait to track these books down.