Visiting Hours
Visiting Hours explores the lives of people not normally met on the page — AIDS patients and those who care for them. Set in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and written with large and frequent dollops of humor, the book is a profound meditation on faith and love in the face of illness and poverty. Moses captures the moods, the characters, and the cadences of the Louisiana natives, residents, staff, and volunteers at a Baton Rouge hospice, where the characters deal — decisively or indecisively — with their pasts and their futures in an attempt to figure out how they got to their present situation.
"In Jennifer Anne Moses's new novel-by-stories, there are no clues that these stories were made, let alone made up. The characters are so real, they seem to have existed before Moses found them, and I felt almost certain they would continue to exist after each tale ended. Everyone lives in natural light, no fancy set-ups, no posing: just people relating to the people who show up in their lives. A generous book by a generous writer."
— Susan Fox Rogers, author of My Reach
"Moses's ability to develop and animate her characters is a true gift. It doesn't get better than this."
— Amazon reviewer
"An extraordinary meditation on faith, love, and what it means to be present for another human being at the end of life."
— Jewish Book Council