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by Ann Hood (Author)
For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he'd befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands--and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life's work of a lonely Italian craftsman. Determined to find the baby and the artist, hopeless romantic Jenny and curmudgeonly Nick must reckon with regret, betrayal, and the lives they've left behind.
With characteristic warmth and verve, Ann Hood captures a world of possibility and romance through the eyes of a young woman learning to claim her place in it. The Stolen Child is an engaging, timeless novel of secrets, love lost and found, and the nature of forgiveness.
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Praise for Ann Hood
"Over the course of her long career, the author Ann Hood has returned to themes of grief and loss again and again, not repetitively but in the sense of mining one vein for its richest stories.... Hood is brilliant at showing the ordinary moments of a family's heartbreak."
-- Kate Egan, New York Times Book Review
"[The Knitting Circle] is a wondrously simple book about something complicated: the nearly unendurable process of enduring after a great loss. The novel, like knitting, seems to make itself up as it goes along, the threads bound and gathered into a whole. In the end, there is something where there once was nothing: a scarf, a pair of socks, solace where there once was pain."
-- Carrie Brown, Washington Post
"Hood never for a paragraph or a page loses control over the story that suffuses her, the sound of the words, the impact of images."
-- Philadelphia Inquirer
"Great novelists can envelop you in relatable plot lines that make you feel like you're part of the story. That's what Ann Hood, author of the much beloved The Knitting Circle, does in her latest."
-- Carrol Memmott, Minnesota Star Tribune
"Engrossing.... I admire this graceful and intimate writer for her literary sleight of hand: you don't so much read about her characters as you inhabit them."
-- Elizabeth Berg, author of The Dream Lover
"Ann Hood is a captivating storyteller--I devoured this novel."
-- Lily King, author of Euphoria
"A love of words, of reading, propels the characters from heartbreak to discovery. Book groups--indeed, book lovers of all kinds--will delight in this compulsively and effortlessly readable novel."
-- Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan Train
"Hood examines the push and pull between mothers and grown children and the transformative power of fiction."
-- People
"Hood's novel is rich with pleasures, and will no doubt launch a thousand book club discussions."
-- Patty Rhule, USA Today
"Ann Hood's eye for the absurd, her masterful prose, and her vivid characters instantly draw you into this compelling story about mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, friends and lovers. But it's the delicate exploration of human fallibility--of love, loss, regret and redemption that make this one of those rare and wonderful books that truly matter."
-- Ann Leary, New York Times best-selling author of The Good House
