indiscretions arise in a dining room when everyone is flushed with wine." Morris' fifth novel was entitled A Hole in the Universe (2004) and tells the story of a man returning to his community after having served 25 years in prison for murder. The Washington Post wrote: "Morris is a master at sympathetic portraits of those clinging to the peripheries of society. And nowhere is her talent more evident than in her extraordinary new novel, A Hole in the Universe. Morris [is] a superb storyteller...and [her] undeniable compassion for and intuitive understanding of her characters' lives make us know and care about these people, too." Her sixth novel, The Lost Mother (2005) was written from the perspective of a 12-year-old boy. He recounts his life after his mother leaves him, his sister and his father in the midst of the Great Depression. The Boston Globe described the book as "wonderful and absorbing", and The Washington Post wrote "The Lost Mother is the quietest, subtlest novel that ever kept me up into the small hours of the night, unable to look away." Morris has said of The Lost Mother:"Inspiration was easy because it was during those same years that my grandmother abandoned her husband and three children. The day she left, she brought her four-year-old daughter and youngest child, my mother, to a friend's house, then, dressed in her very best clothes, my grandmother climbed into a taxi and rode away forever. The image of that little girl watching from the window as her mother deserted her would come to me whenever there was sorrow in my mother's life. Forgiving by nature, my mother tried to understand what had happened, but because she felt such love and fierce loyalty to her own children, her mother's actions remained a painful, troubling mystery. Growing up, I was keenly aware of the loss my mother felt as well as the great love and admiration she had for her father, a quiet country man who raised his three children alone in those desperate times, often working day and night to support them." Morris published her seventh novel, The Last Secret (2009); in an interview on NPR, she said that the idea for it came as she was listening to the song "Gimme Some Lovin'," written by Steve Winwood and members of the Spencer Davis Group. The Last Secret depicts the unraveling of the life of