Fran Littlewood’s Amazing Grace Adams is the latest pick for Jenna Bush Hager’s Today show book club.
Littlewood’s debut novel, published Tuesday by Henry Holt, follows a 45-year-old London woman who abandons her car in a traffic jam and sets off with a cake to try to make amends with her estranged teenage daughter. A critic for Kirkus called the novel “a gripping story of joy, grief, stress, worry, love at first sight, parenting, and trauma.”
Hager announced the selection on the Today show, saying, “We are back to school, and I am assigning the most hilarious, feel-good book of the year. I dare you not to fall wildly in love with Grace.”
Hager choked up as she continued, “It’s a book about love, about grace, about when we fall from those we love, we can always find our way home. I want to cry. I love it … It’s the funniest, easiest read. You will laugh on the first page; you will keep laughing till you’re crying on the last page.”
Littlewood told Today.com that she was inspired to write the novel because she was frustrated at the lack of realistic books about middle age.
“I was so fed up with the kind of vanilla, sanitized cultural depictions of women over 40,” she said. “As I was hitting these ages, it wasn’t how I felt. This notion that we’re supposed to be downtrodden, over the hill, boring—all these adjectives attached to the middle-aged space. I felt that it needed a rebranding.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
