The Stolen Child
Faculty - Creative Writing at The New School
W. W. Norton, 2025
An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate in this moving, page-turning novel from “a gifted storyteller” (People).
For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands—and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life’s work of a lonely Italian craftsman. Determined to find the baby and the artist, hopeless romantic Jenny and curmudgeonly Nick must reckon with regret, betrayal, and the lives they’ve left behind.
With characteristic warmth and verve, Ann Hood captures a world of possibility and romance through the eyes of a young woman learning to claim her place in it. The Stolen Child is an engaging, timeless novel of secrets, love lost and found, and the nature of forgiveness.