• Wally Lamb’s novella is sure to join the ranks of treasured contemporary Christmas stories like Like Glenn Beck’s The Christmas Sweater, Richard Paul Evans’s The Gift, John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas, and David Baldacci’s The Christmas Train.
  

• The Hour I First Believed has sold nearly 350,000 hardcover copies and spent 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. A nationwide bestseller, it hits lists from coast to coast.

• Lamb’s previous novels, I Know This Much Is True and She’s Come Undone, were both #1 New York Times and national bestsellers, and both were selections of Oprah’s Book Club.

With his latest story, Wishin' and Hopin', Wally Lamb takes a turn toward the lighthearted and laugh-provoking. In a vein similar to Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and David Sedaris’s The Santaland Diaries, Lamb’s holiday tale focuses on a feisty parochial school fifth grader named Felix Funicello—a distant cousin of the iconic Annette! Both poignant and hilarious, Wishin' and Hopin' transports us back to October, November, and December of 1964, when LBJ and Lady Bird were in the White House, Meet the Beatles was on everyone’s turntables, and Christmas meant mistletoe, mangers, and midnight mass. Then it propels us from the past to the present so that we might measure what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost.