Amy Stolls, author of The Ninth Wife, on tour May 2011

About The Ninth Wife

• Paperback: 496 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (May 10, 2011)

Bess Gray is a thirty-five-year-old folklorist and amateur martial artist living in Washington, D.C. Just as she’s about to give up all hope of marriage, she meets Rory, a charming Irish musician, and they fall in love. But Rory is a man with a secret, which he confesses to Bess when he asks for her hand: He’s been married eight times before. Shocked, Bess embarks on a quest she feels she must undertake before she can give him an answer. With her bickering grandparents (married sixty-five years), her gay neighbor (himself a mystery), a shar-pei named Stella, and a mannequin named Peace, Bess sets out on a cross-country journey—unbeknownst to Rory—to seek out and question the wives who came before. What she discovers about her own past is far more than she bargained for.

The Ninth Wife is a smart, funny, eye-opening tale of love, marriage, and the power of stories to unlock the true meaning of home and family.

“I love this book’s deft, fresh take on male-female relationships.”
—Marisa de los Santos, New York Times bestselling author of Belong to Me

“A vibrant, nuanced novel about marriage, identity, and the moment when we realize that the shimmer of fantasy pales next to the tumultuous reality of ordinary, everyday happiness.”
—Carolyn Parkhurst, author of The Dogs of Babel

About Amy Stolls

Amy Stolls’s young adult novel Palms to the Ground was published in 2005 to critical acclaim and a Parents’ Choice Gold Award. She spent years as a journalist covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska before she received an MFA in creative writing from American University. Currently, she is the literature program officer for the National Endowment for the Arts, where she has worked since 1998, advising and collaborating with thousands of writers, translators, editors, booksellers, publishers, educators, and presenters nationwide to keep literature a vital part of American society. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and two-year-old son.

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