Kirjahaku

In The Staggerford Flood, John Hassler reunites favorite characters from his award-winning Staggerford novels. When a flood hits the area, Agatha McGee's house on the highest hill in town becomes a refuge for seven female neighbors, friends, and former students for three days and three nights. This overflow of old and new friends—as well as a young priest who thinks Agatha has become a bit too zealous about morality—helps to restore Agatha's distinctive spark.

The village of Staggerford, Minnesota, forms the backdrop for two entertaining novellas that include The Staggerford Murders, in which residents of the Ransford Hotel investigate the murder of leading citizen Neddy Nichols and the disappearance of his wife, and The Life and Death of Nancy Clancy's Nephew, in which elderly W. D. Nestor finds meaning in his life through his relationship with a young boy and his centenarian aunt. Original.

Since 1977, Jon Hassler’s Staggerford series has entranced readers with its funny and charming depiction of life in small-town America. The New Woman is his latest visit to this Minnesota hamlet.At the age of eighty-eight, Agatha McGee has grudgingly moved out of her house on River Street and into the Sunset Senior Apartments. She’s not happy about giving up her independence, and Sunset Senior’s arts and crafts activities and weekly excursions to the Blue Sky Casino are hardly a consolation. Meanwhile two of her close friends pass away, her nephew Frederick is drifting into depression, and a kidnapped little girl has suddenly appeared on her doorstep. With characteristic poise and dignity, Agatha takes on her problems and finds that the bonds of friendship and family are still the key to happiness at any age. Affectionate and life-affirming, The New Woman is another delightful trip to a town with a soul as real as rural America itself.

Once upon a time, before Atheneum in New York took a chance on an unknown author and published "Staggerford" (1977), Jon Hassler wrote a number of short stories that introduce many of the characters in his later novels. Only a handful of these stories had appeared in print (mostly in small literary magazines) until Afton Historical Society Press published the best-selling "Keepsakes" and "Rufus at the Door".

CLASSIC HASSLER, Jon's story is about a man named Jay who has come rather late to his midlife crisis. Nearing fifty, Jay finds himself dislocated by a divorce and by his only child's attempted suicide. Seeking stability, he has taken a temporary teaching position at his alma mater, St. Andrew's College (which sounds suspiciously like St. John's at Collegeville). The story opens in the school's potting shed, which in earlier days had been a root cellar.