Showing results by author "Ann Hood" in All Categories

In China there is a belief that people who are destined to be together are connected by an invisible red thread. After losing her infant daughter in a freak accident, Maya Lange opens The Red Thread, an adoption agency that specializes in placing baby girls from China with American families. Maya finds some comfort in her work, until a group of six couples share their personal stories of desire for a child.

In 1978, in the tailwind of the golden age of air travel, flight attendants were the epitome of glamor and sophistication. Fresh out of college and hungry to experience the world―and maybe, one day, write about it―Ann Hood joined their ranks. After a grueling job search, Hood survived TWA’s rigorous Breech Training Academy and learned to evacuate seven kinds of aircraft, deliver a baby, mix proper cocktails, administer oxygen, and stay calm no matter what the situation.

The rhythm, ritual, and pleasure of knitting are celebrated in this new collection for lovers of both knitting and literature. In Knitting Pearls, two dozen writers write about the transformative and healing powers of knitting. Lily King remembers the year her family lived in Italy, and a knitted hat that helped her daughter adjust to her new home. Laura Lippman explores how converting to Judaism changed not only Christmas but also her mother's gift of a knitted stocking.

In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls. From her Italian-American childhood through raising and feeding a growing family and cooking with her new husband, food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Hood details recipes and more in Kitchen Yarns, along with tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love, and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.

Alexander Porter is on the phone with his six-year-old son when he is struck by lightning and killed. It is a freak accident, without meaning or justice. Alex’s sudden death disintegrates his family. His mother takes off for a new life in California. His father descends into kleptomania. His ex-wife begins selling makeup door to door. His sister mourns by taking Sam, Alex’s son, on a journey into the family’s past, putting her own life on hold. Young Sam, who heard his own father die, has gone silent.

After a college student speeding in a blue Honda Civic kills her husband of less than a year, Olivia is completely lost. One hot summer day, she walks into the beachfront Rhode Island cottage she and David bought the previous August—the place where they had planned to someday start a family—and finds a stranger sitting at her kitchen table. Pregnant fifteen-year-old Ruby is looking for a safe haven for herself and her baby-to-be. Olivia takes her in, desperate to assuage her grief through human connection, even with a troubled teenager.

After the sudden loss of Stella, her only child, Mary Baxter joins a knitting circle in Providence, Rhode Island. Seeking a way to fill the empty hours and lonely days, she little realizes that the circle will change her life.

Libby Harper, unsatisfied with her suburban life, abandons Massachusetts, her two teenage children, and Tom, her husband of eighteen years. Depressed and feeling trapped, she is determined to realize her fantasies of Hollywood fame before it is too late. Dana has been expecting her mother to walk out for years. Her older brother, Troy, who is always in trouble, has been struggling to get his mother’s attention for most of his life. But it is Tom, their father, who is hit the hardest. Once, he and Libby were the most beautiful couple in town.

In Knitting Yarns, twenty-seven writers tell stories about how knitting healed, challenged, or helped them to grow. Poignant, funny, and moving, Knitting Yarns is sure to delight knitting enthusiasts and lovers of literature alike.

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.

Ava's 25-year marriage has fallen apart, and her two grown children are pursuing their own lives outside of the country. Ava joins a book group, not only for her love of reading but also out of sheer desperation for companionship. The group's goal throughout the year is for each member to present the book that matters most to them. Ava rediscovers a mysterious book from her childhood - one that helped her through the traumas of the untimely deaths of her sister and mother.

A sophisticated and suspenseful novel about the poignant lives of two women living in different eras.... On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover, who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.

The day my father was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, I decided to go and find him a miracle. Do Not Go Gentle is a transporting memoir about Ann Hood’s quest to find a cure, if not an outright miracle, that would cure her father’s cancer. Her “spiritual Odyssey, with a secret history all its own” would take her from Rhode Island to El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico, in search of dirt reputed to contain astonishing healing powers.

Katherine shows up at Lucy’s Manhattan doorstep having run away from the marriage altar. Lucy isn’t thrilled to see her former sorority sister—her own life as a children’s book illustrator is complicated enough, especially as she may be falling out of love with her boyfriend. Along with Lucy’s oddball best friend, Julia, the women tackle the complicated challenge of being young, lost, and in search of life in New York City.

Now that the twins have begun to settle into their new lives at Elm Medona, they delve deeper into The Treasure Chest and uncover more about the Pickworth family, including the disappearance of their great-uncle Thorne and the theft of priceless family artifacts. In this adventure, The Treasure Chest transports Felix and Maisie to tropical St. Croix in 1772. There they meet a young man named Alexander Hamilton who is about to embark on a journey to New York.

Meet Clementine. She's quippy, sarcastic, and dramatic. And the overwhelming guilt of her sister's death weighs on her so heavily that she no longer feels like living. As Clementine and her mother attempt to continue their lives after Halley's death, the world around them changes. Clementine's best friend now feels like a stranger. Her new school is full of spoiled, carefree kids. She kisses boys just to feel something. She tries to live in the moment. But ultimately, Clementine feels trapped in a snow globe.

Katie was Jude's favorite person in the world. And not many brothers say that about their sister and mean it. But to Jude, Katie was everything - the person who made him learn how to say "I love you" in every language, who performed dramatic readings of Romeo and Juliet, who obsessed over every item on the diner menu looking for the most authentic diner meal. The one who called him "Jude Banks, Superhero," because to her, Jude was the best.

Bound by tradition, she gives birth to seven children; the last, conceived in a passionate affair, Josephine must give up for adoption. Josephine spends the rest of her life searching for this child, keeping her secret even as her other children, whose stories unfold in surprising ways, go off to war, get married, and make their own mistakes: Her son suffers in World War I. Her daughter struggles to assimilate in the new world of the 1950s American suburbs.

In her admired works of fiction, including the recent The Book That Matters Most, Ann Hood explores the transformative power of literature. Now, with warmth and honesty, Hood reveals the personal story behind these works of fiction. Growing up in a mill town in Rhode Island, in a household that didn't foster the love of literature, Hood nonetheless learned to channel her imagination and curiosity by devouring The Bell Jar, Marjorie Morningstar, The Harrad Experiment, and other works.

The year is 1966. The Vietnam War rages overseas, the Beatles have catapulted into stardom, and 12-year-old Rhode Island native Trudy Mixer is not thrilled with life. Her best friend, Michelle, has decided to become a cheerleader, everyone at school is now calling her Gertrude (her hated real name), and the gem of her middle school career, the Beatles fan club, has dwindled down to only three other members - the least popular kids at school. Determined to regain her social status, Trudy looks toward the biggest thing happening worldwide: the Beatles.