Monica Wood

Richard Russo has celebrated Monica Wood's fiction as "thoroughly captivating warm and wise and beautifully written," and Andre Dubus III praised it as "luminous and graceful entertaining yet transcendent." Any Bitter Thing, Wood's brilliant new novel, is her breakout book, a timely, gripping, and compassionate tale …

He came to me first in a dream, as a crippled dog angling down a country lane, puzzled by his sudden age, his bum paw, the dry stick clamped between his teeth. I’d been expecting this dream for a very long time, and I woke up moving. . . .Rita Rosario has a gift, a way with people. She listens to them and really sees …

Connie has trouble with time. She always has to stop and think a minute: How old is she now? . . . Faith always seems to know, though her life is the same as Connie’s: back and forth to theater towns all over. The same dingy food, the same noisy sidewalks, the same cramped suites in the same hotels. . . Sometimes they …

1963, Mexico, Maine. The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on a father’s wages from the Oxford Paper Company. Until the sudden death of Dad, when Mum and the four closely connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the …