Bobbie Ann Mason’s “Dear Ann” is a poignant journey through memory and might-have-beens. This hardcover novel, a thoughtful blend of literary and women’s fiction, follows Ann, a Kentucky native navigating the transformative late 60s. Her intense, formative relationship with Jimmy, a Chicago rebel, is the heart of the story, complicated by the looming Vietnam War. Years later, Ann reflects on choices made and paths not taken, questioning how a different decision might have altered her destiny. Was acceptance into Stanford worth sacrificing the life she had? A Kirkus Best Book and PEN/Faulkner Award nominee, it explores nostalgia, regret, and the enduring power of the past with Mason’s signature grace. Perfect for readers who enjoy character-driven narratives and stories that resonate long after the final page.
Dear Ann: A Novel
22,92 $
In stock
Longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
A Kirkus Best Book of the Year
From the acclaimed author of the classics Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country comes a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love.
Ann Workman is smart but nave, a misfit whos traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn fora boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the Real Thing, to be in love with someone who loves her equally.
Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything. Ann and Jimmy bond through music and literature and their own quirkiness, diving headfirst into what seems to be a perfect relationship. But with the Vietnam War looming and the country in turmoil, their future is uncertain.
Many years later, Ann recalls this time of innocenceand her own obsession with Jimmyas she faces another life crisis. Seeking escape from her problems, she tries to imagine where she might be if she had chosen differently all those years ago. What if she had gone to Stanford University, as her mentor had urged, instead of a small school on the East Coast? Would she have been caught up in the Summer of Love and its subsequent dark turns? Or would her own good sense have saved her from disaster?
Beautifully written and expertly told, Dear Ann is the wrenching story of one womans life and the choices she has made. Bobbie Ann Mason captures at once the excitement of youth and the nostalgia of age, and how consideration of the road not takenthe interplay of memory and imaginationcan illuminate, and perhaps overtake, our present.
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