All the Acorns on the Forest Floor

Hooper’s tender collection of linked stories (after People Who Knew Me) explores the pain and turmoil of fertility issues. In “Notes for a Eulogy,” a pregnant Alexi learns her boyfriend Jake’s father has ALS, and that the disease is hereditary. Alexi and Jake reappear in the title story, pregnant for a second time following Alexi’s miscarriage of their first child, as Jake channels his anxiety into rescuing abandoned hummingbirds. In “The Craigslist Baby,” Dina, a nurse lacking in bedside manner (“Nature is very wasteful... Just look at all the acorns on the forest floor,” she tells Alexi), struggles through unsuccessful fertility treatments and schemes to steal a baby from an undeserving mother. Deb, Jake’s stepmom, discovers her parents hid the story of her abandonment and adoption in “What We Cannot Know.” Laney, just entering menopause, regrets her and her husband’s long-standing, sneering aversion toward the idea of raising children when she holds her sister Sasha’s adopted baby for the first time in “When They Were Young.” While Hooper occasionally slips into maudlin reflections (Alexi: “I suppose I’m too afraid to get attached to her, only to lose her the way we lost her brother. Ben, our son who wasn’t”), each story hums with the characters’ turbulent emotions. This fine collection is a winner for book clubs. (Sept.)