Elizabeth Strout is the author ofAbide with Me, a national bestseller and Book Sense pick, andAmy and Isabelle, which won theLos Angeles TimesArt Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, includingThe New YorkerandO: The Oprah Magazine.She is on the faculty of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina, and lives in New York City. From the Hardcover edition.