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End-of-the-Year Contest 2024

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The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands --- and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life’s work of a lonely Italian craftsman. Determined to find the baby and the artist, hopeless romantic Jenny and curmudgeonly Nick must reckon with regret, betrayal and the lives they’ve left behind.

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Ann Hood, author of The Stolen Child

For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands --- and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery.

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The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

May 2024

Ann Hood has been interested in World War I for a while. She has traveled to battlefields and read extensively on the subject. So her writing a novel, THE STOLEN CHILD, set partially in this time period makes a lot of sense. She knows her way around the facts to create a beautiful story up against them.

Nick Burns was a soldier in the war, and he has been haunted by something for decades. As enemy forces headed into town, a young woman thrust her baby and two of her paintings into this young American’s hands, imploring him to take care of her son. And then she was gone.

Nick was unable to keep the boy and left him in what he thought would be a safe place. But the child and these paintings, which he still has, have been on his mind for the longest time. What happened to the baby, and what happened to the painter?

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Week of May 5, 2025

Paperback releases for the week of May 5th include THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese, a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith and medicine that follows three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret; Lucy Foley's THE MIDNIGHT FEAST, a deliciously twisty locked-room mystery set at a luxe coastal retreat; I WILL RUIN YOU, an intriguing psychological thriller from Linwood Barclay, in which a teacher’s act of heroism inadvertently makes him the target of a dangerous blackmailer; Ann Hood's THE STOLEN CHILD, a moving, page-turning novel about   an unlikely duo venturing through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate; and THE YEAR OF LIVING CONSTITUTIONALLY, which chronicles A.J. Jacobs'  hilarious adventures in attempting to follow the original meaning of the Constitution, as he searches for answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America’s foundational document?  

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