The Beauty of Ordinary Things

Back from a tour of duty in Vietnam, Benny Finn, eldest son in a large Irish-American family, strives to find his bearings amid the everyday life of 1973 New England. At a Benedictine abbey in rural New Hampshire, Sister Clare, a young novice, confronts the day-to-day realities of a cloistered existence.Linking these two is Isabel Howell, a college student soon to discover that she must chart the course of her own life in a way she could not have imagined.Deeply felt, often luminously moving, The Beauty of Ordinary Things carries forward the promise of Harriet Scott Chessman's earlier work, revealing a writer richly aware of the range of human tragedy and tenderness.

Harriet Scott Chessman is the author of three previous novels, including the #1 Indie Next Pick and book-club favorite Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper as well as the Good Morning America Book Club selection and San Francisco Chronicle top pick Someone Not Really Her Mother. Her fiction has been translated into ten languages. She has taught literature and writing at Yale University, the Bread Loaf School of English, and Stanford University's Continuing Studies Program. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.