Jo-Ann Mapson, the author of the beloved Hank & Chloe, discusses and signs her new novel, Solomon's Oak (Bloomsbury, $25.00), the story of three people who have suffered losses that changed their lives forever:

Glory Solomon, a young widow, holds tight to her memories while she struggles to hold on to her Central California farm. She makes ends meet by hosting weddings in the chapel her husband had built under their two-hundred-year-old white oak tree, known locally as Solomon's Oak. Fourteen-year-old Juniper McGuire is the lone survivor of a family decimated by her sister's disappearance. She arrives on Glory's doorstep, pierced, tattooed, angry, and homeless. When Glory's husband Dan was alive, they took in foster children, but Juniper may be more than she can handle alone. Joseph Vigil is a former Albuquerque police officer and crime lab photographer who was shot during a meth lab bust that took the life of his best friend. Now disabled and in constant pain, he arrives in California to fulfill his dream of photographing the state's giant trees, including Solomon's Oak.

Jo-Ann Mapson is the author of nine previous novels, including  Hank & Chloe, Blue Rodeo (CBS TV movie), and the Los Angeles Times bestsellers The Wilder Sisters and Bad Girl Creek, a book club favorite. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband and their five dogs. Whether writing about the stark beauty of a California canyon or the poverty of an Arizona reservation, Mapson's landscapes are imbued with life. Setting her fiction in the Southwest, she writes about a region that she knows well; after growing up in California and living for a time in Arizona and New Mexico, she also attributes her focus on setting to the influence of Wallace Stegner.