A REMARKABLE NEW WOMAN AT THE COLLEGE BOOKSHOP HELPS A PROFESSOR--AND THE SON HE NEVER KNEW HE HAD--REALIZE LIFE'S SMALL BLESSINGS

Tom Putnam has resigned himself to a quiet and half-fulfilled life. An English professor in a sleepy college town, he spends his days browsing the Shakespeare shelves at the campus bookstore, managing his department's oddball faculty, and caring for his wife Marjory, a fragile shut-in with unrelenting neuroses, a condition exacerbated by her discovery of Tom's brief affair with a visiting poetess a decade earlier.
Then, one evening at the bookstore,...