Tag Archives: evensong

6/13/2026 6pm: Stewart O’Nan at the Carriage Barn

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From Ashaway Free Library:

Please join us for a special evening with bestselling and award-winning author Stewart O’Nan to benefit the Ashaway Free Library. We’ll discuss his newest novel, Evensong, and his 2022 thriller, Ocean State, which is set in Ashaway!

The evening will kick off with a reception, featuring food, drinks, and an opportunity to explore our wonderfully unique venue, a private carriage museum in North Stonington, CT. An author chat, during which Stewart O’Nan will be in conversation with library director Heather Field, will follow.

Tickets are $100 and include food, a drink ticket, access to the carriage museum, the author visit, and a hardcover copy of Evensong. All proceeds will support the Ashaway Free Library’s collections, services, and programs.

We expect tickets for this extraordinary opportunity to sell out. Be sure to grab yours early to avoid disappointment!

Thank you to our generous sponsor, Washington Trust.

Photo credit: Antone Botelho Photography.

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From AuthorLink: “Evensong Deals With the Many Challenges of Aging”

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To read a Stewart O’Nan novel is to be immersed in a particular subculture with its own rules and limitations, and to watch the people in that group as they connect with each other and seek to make their way in a challenging world.

His latest novel, Evensong, focuses on the Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of older women in Pittsburgh who care for each other and help members of the community. Told in alternating viewpoints, the trials of Joan, Kitzi, Emily and Arlene as they age are handled with dignity and grace.  The women’s participation in the Anglican church’s evensong serves as an anchor and a respite to their challenges.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

O’NAN: I started writing on my own, in my basement after work, using John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction as my guide.  His explanations of point of view, psychic distance and sentence variation were revelations.  I was also reading as much as I could, taking out the O. Henry and Best American Short Stories collections, trying to figure out how stories worked.

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Evensong: Telegraph review and best of 2025 lists

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Check out The Telegraph’s review of Evensong:

When does the slide into old age begin? With a number? Or does it begin to manifest at the point at which a person starts to become invisible? These are the questions posed by Evensong, the latest book from American novelist Stewart O’Nan, and his fourth to include the character of octogenarian widow Emily Maxwell. In this novel, she’s a member of the Humpty Dumpty Club, a group of women of a certain age who band together to help one another and their local ageing community with everyday chores – grocery shopping; collecting prescriptions – in their native Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Plus Evensong appears on two best of 2025 lists:

“Evensong” by Stewart O’Nan (Atlantic Monthly Press, $28) is a layered novel of women’s friendships as they age together and support one another. The characters are warm and funny, there are a few times when your heart will sit in your throat, and you won’t be sorry you read it. It’s just plain irresistible.

‘Even­song’

By Stew­art O’Nan

I’m only just now real­iz­ing how many of my favor­ite nov­els this year are about fam­il­ies grap­pling with rap­idly chan­ging cir­cum­stances in their lives and in the world. In this one, Emily Max­well (from pre­vi­ous O’Nan nov­els, includ­ing “Emily, Alone”) is a mem­ber of the Humpty Dumpty Club, a com­munity of women who take care of one another in the retire­ment com­munity where most of them live. O’Nan’s book closely observes the every­day joys and sor­rows of their life, pay­ing par­tic­u­lar atten­tion to the ways in which the women have cre­ated a new kind of fam­ily.

Financial Times: Evensong by Stewart O’Nan — a bittersweet portrait of ageing in America

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The author beautifully evokes the everyday pleasures and niggling troubles of four friends in their later years

Old age is one long painful process of “incremental weakening”, writes the American novelist Stewart O’Nan in Evensong, his moving story of four elderly Pittsburgh ladies who find solace in assisting others. Emily, Arlene, Kitzi and Susie are core members of the Humpty Dumpty Club, an informal group of women who help friends and neighbours with the practicalities, indignities and relentless admin bound up with one’s final years: collecting prescriptions, ordering groceries, offering lifts to hospital appointments and, eventually, making the inevitable funeral arrangements.

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