Martha Woodroof was born in the South, went to boarding school and college in New England, ran away to Texas for a while, then fetched up in Virginia. She has written for NPR, npr.org, Marketplace and Weekend America, and for the Virginia Foundation for Humanities Radio Feature Bureau. Her print essays have appeared in such newspapers as The New York Times, The Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. SMALL BLESSINGS is her debut novel. She lives with her husband in the Shenandoah Valley. Their closest neighbors are cows.

Photo Credit: Charles Woodroof

Books by Martha Woodroof

Small Blessings

by Martha Woodroof - Fiction

For more than 10 years, Tom Putnam's wife, Marjory, has been a shut-in whose neuroses have left her fully dependent on Tom and his mother-in-law. Tom considers his unhappy condition self-inflicted, since Marjory’s condition was exacerbated by her discovery of his affair with a visiting poetess. When a letter from the poetess arrives telling Tom that he’d fathered her son, Henry, and that Henry will arrive by train in a few days, it’s clear change is coming whether Tom is ready or not.