Dear Neighbor,
Here is some interesting literary news with a local connection. SWCA Board member Anne Hogeland just told me that her daughter, Anna (who grew up in Williamstown), will be signing copies of her new novel at the Williams Book Store on Spring Street this coming Saturday morning and at Northshire Books in Manchester, Vermont, Thursday at 5:30pm.
Here are details:
June 30 (Thursday)
In Person, indoors; masks recommended
Manchester, Vermont – 4869 Main Street
Reading and discussion with Genevieve Plunkett (Prepare Her)
5:30 p.m.
July 2 (Saturday)
In Person, outdoors
Williamstown, Massachusetts – 81 Spring Street
Williams Bookstore
Signing table from 10 a.m. to noon
Anna Hogeland's debut novel The Long Answer was released last week by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House). The Long Answer is available in hardcover from local and online bookstores and as an audiobook from Audible and libro.fm.
From the publisher:
A woman considers pregnancy, motherhood, and the nature of female relationships in this profound and provocative novel.
Twelve weeks pregnant for the first time, Anna speaks to her sister on the other side of the country and learns she has just miscarried her second child. As this loss strains their bond and complications with Anna’s own pregnancy emerge, her tenuous steps towards motherhood are shadowed and illuminated by the women she meets along the way, whose stories of the children they have had, or longed for, or lost, crowd in.
The Long Answer is a stunning novel of secrets kept, and secrets shared. Deeply empathetic and hugely absorbing, it unravels the intimate dynamics of female friendship, sisterhood, motherhood and grief, and the ways that women are bound together and pulled apart by their shared and contrasting experiences of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, and infertility. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672456/the-long-answer-by-anna-hogeland/
A review in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/books/review/the-long-answer-anna-hogeland.html
For a list of upcoming events (local and virtual) as well as other writings relating to the novel, see annahogeland.com.
Bette Craig, President,SWCA