Hood has done a marvelous job of setting up the divergent story-threads and then drawing them together at the end. Now, her own daughter is on a path of self-destruction. Anna lost her sister and her mother when she was just a child. She almost views it as a lifeline to reconnect to people and to restructure her life in a new direction. Anna, whose marriage is falling apart and whose grown children are far away, is welcomed into this limited-membership book club. Read moreĪuthor Ann Hood has written a remarkable novel, telling a story of past and present lives and using the framework of a book club to voice it.

She now lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her husband and their children. Hood has won awards for the best American spiritual writing, travel writing, and food writing the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction and two Pushcart Prizes. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the Paris Review. She has also written a memoir, Do Not Go Gentle: My Search for Miracles in a Cynical Time a book on the craft of writing, Creating Character Emotions and a collection of short stories, An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life. Her other novels include Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, Waiting to Vanish, Three-Legged Horse, Something Blue, Places to Stay the Night, The Properties of Water, and Ruby. Her memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the author of the bestselling novels The Knitting Circle, The Red Thread, and The Obituary Writer. Ann Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island.

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