Dear Ann

By Bobbie Ann Mason

Book Overview

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 na ve, a misfit who's 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 for--a 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 innocence--and her own obsession with
Jimmy--as 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
woman's 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 taken--the interplay of memory and imagination--can illuminate, and
perhaps overtake, our present.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062986651
• ISBN13: 9780062986658
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.1" x 9.0"