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Small Blessings: A Novel Audiobook
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Publisher Description
From debut novelist Martha Woodroof comes an inspiring tale of a small-town college professor, a remarkable new woman at the bookshop, and the ten-year-old son he never knew he had.
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 heading Tom's way on a train. His mind races at the possibility of having a family after so many years of loneliness. And it becomes clear change is coming whether Tom's ready or not.
Martha Woodroof's Small Blessings is funny, heart-warming and poignant, with a charmingly imperfect cast of cinema-ready characters. Listeners will fall in love with the novel's wonderfully optimistic heart that reminds us that sometimes, when it feels like life is veering irrevocably off track, the track changes in ways we never could have imagined.
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"Small Blessings is a comedy of manners that will capture your heart. Woodroof's prose is tart and sweet -- smart enough to make you laugh, but with an aching soul that will make you cry. I loved these characters even as I was chuckling at them, and I know Rose and Tom are a couple you'll relish rooting for. If Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh collaborated on a story about a small academic community in the South, and Woody Allen directed, Small Blessings might be the result. Get ready for pure pleasure shot through with moments of illumination: maybe this is how love really is."
— Lydia Netzer, author of Shine Shine Shine
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“In Small Blessings, Woodroof displays a lovely gift for inventive plot turns and glittering moments. The novel brims with life and complexity and characters who never stop surprising themselves, and each other. This is a delightful and splendidly intelligent comedy.
— Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy -
In the world of Small Blessings, to choose happiness is to take a risk... Optimistic, wise, and beautifully written, this book about love in all its colors, hope, and the glory of third chances will stay with you long after you close the cover.
— Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of A Grown Up Kind of Pretty -
“In Small Blessings, Woodroof displays a lovely gift for inventive plot turns and glittering moments. The novel brims with life and complexity and characters who never stop surprising themselves, and each other. This is a delightful and splendidly intelligent comedy.”
— Margot Livesey, New York Times bestselling author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy -
“In the world of Small Blessings, to choose happiness is to take a risk…Optimistic, wise, and beautifully written, this book about love in all its colors, hope, and the glory of third chances will stay with you long after you close the cover.”
— Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of A Grown Up Kind of Pretty -
"Along with dark humor and a confident command of story, strong characters and absurdist twists add to the fun.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Small Blessings is a comedy of manners that will capture your heart. Woodroof’s prose is tart and sweet—smart enough to make you laugh, but with an aching soul that will make you cry. I loved these characters even as I was chuckling at the, and I know Rose and Tom are a couple you’ll relish rooting for...Get ready for pure pleasure shot through with moments of illumination: maybe this is how love really is.”
— Lydia Netzer, author of Shine Shine Shine
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About the Authors
Nickolas Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. His writings have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review Online, the Progressive, the Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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, Marketplace, 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, 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.
About the Narrators
Scott Shepherd is best known for his work with two internationally celebrated theater companies, the Wooster Group and Elevator Repair Service. He was the narrator of Gatz, a seven-hour staging of the entire text of The Great Gatsby, for which he won an Obie and an Elliot Norton Award.
Lorelei King is an award-winning narrator and an actress of stage, film, and television. She also works extensively in radio, including award-winning voiceover work. She has narrated more than eighty audiobooks, earning eleven AudioFile Earphones Awards and twice winning the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration.