Small Blessings

A small-town college professor meets the ten-year-old son he never knew he had: “This warm, wise tale leaves a smile long after the final page is turned.” —People

Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing the oddball faculty in his department, and caring, alongside his formidable mother-in-law, for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom’s brief and misguided affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.

Then, one evening at the bookstore, Tom and Marjory meet Rose Callahan, the shop’s charming new hire, and Marjory invites Rose to their home for dinner, out of the blue, her first social interaction since her breakdown. Tom wonders if it’s a sign that change is on the horizon, a feeling confirmed upon his return home, where he opens a letter from his former paramour informing him he’d fathered a son—who is, at the moment, heading Tom’s way on a train . . .

A heartwarming story with a charmingly imperfect cast of characters to cheer for, Small Blessings reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life has veered irrevocably off track, the track shifts in ways we never could have imagined.

“Thoroughly entertaining.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A delightful and splendidly intelligent comedy.” —Margot Livesey, New York Times–bestselling author of The Road from Belhaven