Alice McDermott is the author of eight novels and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her books That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This. She won the National Book Award and the American Book Award for Charming Billy, the tragic story of the late Billy Lynch in a complex, tightly knit Irish American community. The New York Times Book Review praises it as "eloquent" and "heartbreaking.” Her newest novel, The Ninth Hour, a powerfully affecting story of a widow, her daughter and the nuns who serve their Irish-American community in Brooklyn, tops 2017 year-end best books lists from countless publications, including NPR, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. “McDermott is a poet of corporeal description,” says Time. “It’s the way she marries the spirit to the physical world that makes her work transcendent . . . The Ninth Hour is a story with the simple grace of a votive candle in a dark church.”  The New Yorker calls her language “glorious.” McDermott's other books include Someone, Child of My Heart and A Bigamist’s Daughter. O Magazine says, “McDermott has the soul of an archaeologist—excavating shards of the daily routine, closely examining the cracks and crevices of the human heart.” She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and is currently writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Bestselling novelist Claire Messud’s new novel, The Burning Girl, is a bracing, hypnotic coming-of-age story about the bond of best friends. The Chicago Tribune calls it a “masterwork of psychological fiction.” Messud has struck a singular mark on the literary world in “evoking complex psychological territory," explains The New Yorker. Her last book, The Woman Upstairs, unravels the riveting confession of a woman awakened, transformed and abandoned by a desire for a world beyond her own. The Washington Post calls it “fantastically smart” and The New York Times Book Review hails it an “ingenious, disquieting novel.” The Emperor’s Children was a New York Times Best Book of the Year that the Los Angeles Times called “a robust, canny and surprisingly searching novel [told] with a light-handed irony that is, by turns, as measured as Edith Wharton’s and as cutting as Tom Wolfe’s.” Messud’s first novel, When the World Was Steady, and her book of novellas, The Hunters, were finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her second novel, The Last Life, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice at The Village Voice. Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a senior lecturer at Harvard and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Tayari Jones’ stirring, thought-provoking new novel, An American Marriage, tackles big issues—race, loyalty, resilience—and perhaps the biggest issue of them all: love. As she takes readers into the hearts and minds of three ordinary people bound and separated by circumstances beyond their control, Jones probes the very souls of her unforgettable characters, giving equal measure to their virtues and flaws. "An American Marriage asks hard questions about injustice and betrayal, and answers them with a heartbreaking and genuinely suspenseful love story in which nobody's wrong and everybody's wounded,” says past Sojourn author Tom Perrotta. A rising literary voice, Jones’ last novel, Silver Sparrow, was a No. 1 Indie Next Pick, was named an NEA Big Read, and was chosen as a Best Book by O, The Oprah Magazine, Library Journal, Slate and Salon. Jones’ previous novels also include Leaving Atlanta and The Untelling. A member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she has been a recipient of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, United States Artist Fellowship, NEA Fellowship and Radcliffe Institute Bunting Fellowship. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon hails Jones for being “blessed with vision to see through to the surprising and devastating truths at the heart of ordinary lives, strength to wrest those truths free, and a gift of language to lay it all out, compelling and clear.”