Hope Is a Hard Thing is a collection of quiet, intimate stories about the lives we build, the things we carry, and the moments that change us when no one is watching.

These stories live in kitchens after everyone has gone to bed. On empty train platforms. In cheap motels off the interstate. In the sleepless noise of truckstops and the long, slow hours of waiting. They belong to people carrying things they don’t know how to put down yet — widows and drifters, waitresses and working men, daughters who never came back, and lovers who never quite left.

Some of these pieces are fully told stories. Others are fragments. Found moments. Remnants of lives overheard and remembered. Together they form a quiet record of trying, failing, leaving, staying, and learning how to live with the ache of wanting something more.

Hope runs through every page — sometimes stubborn, sometimes fragile, sometimes barely there at all — but always present in the space between what was lost and what might still be waiting.

Spare, tender, and deeply human, Hope Is a Hard Thing is a book for readers who believe the smallest moments often carry the greatest weight.