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advance praise for book of hours
“Fierce, transcendent, and deeply felt, Book of Hours is a powerful meditation on faith, womanhood, and the mysteries carried within the body. Luminous and spiritually intense, this is a haunting and unforgettable novel about the sacred stories women inherit—and the ones they must write for themselves.” —Chelsea Bieker, bestselling author of Madwoman and Godshot
“Book of Hours left me speechless. Profound, incisive, and lyrical, this is the unflinching story of a woman abandoned. O’Connell Whittet writes with a rare acuity about birth trauma, religious trauma, and the insidious violence of a country that prioritizes hypothetical babies over gestational parents’ health, well-being, and autonomy. Is it blasphemous to say that she has, by virtue of writing this book, managed to create a new holy sacrament of suffering under erasure? This book both nourished and awakened me.” —Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp and Endless Need
“Book of Hours is the most unique novel I’ve read in years. If, like me, you’ve been craving bold, undeniable art on the page, you’ll fall in love with this book’s exquisite contours of faith and womanhood. I don’t say this lightly—Ellen O’Connell Whittet continues to be one of the most thoughtful, daring, and sophisticated writers of our time.”—Amy Jo Burns, author of Wait for Me
"A moving and beautiful novel about devotion as a bodily force. As the protagonist makes herself a vessel for faith and then for motherhood, Ellen O'Connell Whittet writes her suffering, rage, and transcendence so powerfully that the reader feels them too. The result is a fierce defense of the right to autonomy even as the self is pulled, stretched, filled, and changed."—Clare Beams, author of The Garden
“Ellen O’Connell Whittet is a tremendously smart and sensitive writer who has given us a riveting, vivid, and lyrical novel about womanhood, faith, and childbirth. I was hypnotized from the first page to the last, and its spell over me lingered for days. This is a powerful and unforgettable book.” —Annie Hartnett, bestselling author of The Road to Tender Hearts
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ellen O’Connell Whittet teaches in the Writing Program and College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her memoir, What You Become in Flight (Melville House, 2020) was named a most-anticipated book by Refinery 29 and Chicago Review. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She co-hosts the podcast Good Moms on Paper with writers Annie Hartnett and Tessa Fontaine. Ellen has written for The Cut, Time, Vogue, Paris Review Daily, Buzzfeed, Vulture, The Atlantic, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, where she won the Virginia Faulkner Award, the Harper Perennial Anthology The Moment (2012), and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Santa Barbara, CA.
