Joe Jones

Joe Jones is Anne Lamott's raucous novel of the lives gathered around Jessie's Cafe, "a restaurant from another era, the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck or Saroyan." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the cafe years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, "sexy and sweet, somewhere on the cusp between curvaceous and fat"; Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie's gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday. Anne Lamott is the best-selling author of Operating Instructions, Bird by Bird, Traveling Mercies, and most recently Blue Shoe. Her column in Salon magazine was voted the Best of the Web by Newsweek magazine. She lives in Northern California with her son, Sam. Reader Barbara Rosenblat is a multiple award-winning audiobook narrator and has been selected as one of the "Golden Voices of the 20th Century" by Audiofile Magazine, the industry's leading publication. Barbara has appeared in film and television, as well as theatre in London's West End and on Broadway.