Acclaimed writer Alice McDermott explores themes close to her heart: love and the loss of innocence, the interlocking stories of family, Irish-American culture and assimilation, and children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents in “work that revels in a rich, discursive prose style that belongs entirely to Alice McDermott” (New York Times). Her prismatic novels include Charming Billy—winner of the 1998 National Book Award—and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This—all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The transformative moments of joy, heartbreak, clarity, and confusion of a life lived by an ordinary woman are the subject of her new novel Someone. 

A master of quiet domestic worlds and “suspense worthy of Hitchcock” (The New York Times Book Review), Lauren Grodstein is the author of the New York Times Editor’s Pick A Friend of the Family, a novel with “such an incisive diagnosis of aspirational America that someone should hand out copies at Little League games and ballet recitals” (The Washington Post). Her other works include the novel Reproduction is the Flaw of Love and The Best of Animals, a short story collection in which urban 20-somethings reconcile their ambivalent feelings for each other. Grodstein is a professor of creative writing at Rutgers-Camden. In The Explanation for Everything, an evolutionary biologist searches for meaning and moral position when he directs a young evangelist’s independent study.