Author Talk: An Evening with Monica Wood

Monica Wood, who is a best selling and award winning novelist, will be talking about her most recent novel, How to Read a Book, and the unusually delightful research it required to write.

Copies of her novel will be available for sale and Monica will be signing books after the presentation.

About the Book

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…

Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher.

Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest.

Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.

When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.

How to Read a Book is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.

From Harper Collins Publishers

About the Author

Monica Wood is a novelist, memoirist, and playwright, and recipient of the Carlson Prize for contributions to the public humanities in Maine, and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Distinguished Achievement Award for contributions to the literary arts. Her new novel, How to Read a Book, has already secured translation rights in five countries. Her new play, Saint Dad, debuted in October 2023 at Portland Stage. Her previous novel, The One-in-a-Million Boy, was translated into 20 languages in over 30 countries. She is also the author of When We Were the Kennedys, a New England bestseller, Oprah magazine summer-reading pick, and winner of the May Sarton Memoir Award. Her other fiction, Any Bitter Thing, Ernie’s Ark, and My Only Story have also won awards and made bestseller lists. Her short stories have been widely anthologized and featured on Public Radio International.

Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Literary Hub, Oprah Magazine, Down East, the San Francisco Chronicle, Martha Stewart Living, Parade, and many other publications. Her play Papermaker, which broke attendance records for its debut at Portland Stage, has enjoyed many subsequent productions, and The Half-Light, which also broke attendance records, had its second production in October 2023 at Theatre 40 in Beverly Hills. She lives in Portland, Maine.