Synopses & Reviews
From the acclaimed author of the #1 Indie Next Pick
Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper and the
Good Morning America Book Club Selection and
San Francisco Chronicle Top Pick
Someone Not Really Her Mother comes a powerful new story about our yearning for wholeness and the enduring weight of our briefest encounters.
Back from a tour of duty in Vietnam, Benny Finn, eldest son in a large Irish-American family, strives to find his bearings amid the everyday life of 1973 New England. At a Benedictine abbey in rural New Hampshire, Sister Clare, a young novice, confronts the day-to-day realities of a cloistered existence. Linking these two is Isabel Howell, a college student soon to discover that she must chart the course of her own life in a way she could not have imagined.
Deeply felt, often luminously moving, The Beauty of Ordinary Things carries forward the promise of Harriet Scott Chessman's earlier work, revealing a writer richly aware of the range of human tragedy and tenderness.
Review
"The Beauty of Ordinary Things is a soulful, tender, affecting novel, with complex, searching, sympathetic characters whose situations and plights one deeply cares about. Harriet Scott Chessman has written another wonderful book!" Ron Hansen, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion
Review
"The Beauty of Ordinary Things is an exquisitely written and profoundly moving story of love's possibilities, powers, and consolations." Priscilla Gilman, author of The Anti-Romantic Child
Review
"Like Annie Dillard, Chessman plumbs the mysteries of the spirit and celebrates the quiet grace notes of the earth. The Beauty of Ordinary Things is deep as a prayer, a meditation on two people seeking their right place in the world. This book speaks softly, but oh how it lingers in the mind. I can't praise it enough." Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad and Confessions of a Falling Woman
Review
"Quite simply stunning. In an exquisite few pages, Harriet Scott Chessman delivers a gigantic story." Meg Waite Clayton, New York Times bestselling author of The Wednesday Daughters
Review
"Stays with one, hauntingly, long after one finishes reading. You will never forget Benny Finn or Sister Clare." Maud Carol Markson, author of Looking After Pigeon and When We Get Home
Review
"A gorgeous meditation on love and spirit, grief and passion, that unfolds with startling elegance. It captivated and moved me in equal measure." Carolina De Robertis, author of Perla and The Invisible Mountain
About the Author
Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of three previous novels, including the #1 Indie Next Pick and book-club favorite Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper as well as the Good Morning America Book Club selection and San Francisco Chronicle top pick, Someone Not Really Her Mother. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages.