Dear Ann

From the acclaimed author of the classics Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country comes a beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel which follows a woman as she looks back over her life and her first love

Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who's traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s

While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for--a boyfriend

But not any boy

She wants the "Real Thing," to be in love with someone who loves her equally

Then Jimmy appears as if by magic

Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything

Ann and Jimmy bond through music and literature and their own quirkiness, diving headfirst into what seems to be a perfect relationship

But with the Vietnam War looming and the country in turmoil, their future is uncertain

Many years later, Ann recalls this time of innocence--and her own obsession with Jimmy--as she faces another life crisis

Seeking escape from her problems, she tries to imagine where she might be if she had chosen differently all those years ago

What if she had gone to Stanford University, as her mentor had urged, instead of a small school on the East Coast? Would she have been caught up in the Summer of Love and its subsequent dark turns? Or would her own good sense have saved her from disaster? Beautifully written and expertly told, Dear Ann is the wrenching story of one woman's life and the choices she has made

Bobbie Ann Mason captures at once the excitement of youth and the nostalgia of age, and how consideration of the road not taken--the interplay of memory and imagination--can illuminate, and perhaps overtake, our present.