Ann Hood’s 2016 novel “The Book that Matters Most” was named a Wall Street Journal book of the year and a People magazine best new book, sure, but that’s just one of the most recent releases by this prolific and popular author.

Her previous work boasts 14 novels — including “The Knitting Circle” and “An Italian Wife” — as well as three memoirs, a short-story collection, a 10-book series for middle readers, and a young adult novel.

Hood — who grew up in West Warwick, R.I., majored in English at URI, and lives in Providence — will be in East Lyme on Oct. 14 as part of the fourth Celebrity Author Luncheon presented by the East Lyme Auxiliary of Child and Family Agency and Bank Square Books of Mystic.

She will speak and sign her books during the program, which is open to the public. Joining her will be her husband, author Michael Ruhlman. He has written extensively about food and cooking, including a number of books with chefs and the 2017 release “Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America.” In 2015, Ruhlman saw his fiction published for the first time with “In Short Measures: Three Novellas.”

Hood and Ruhlman, who have children Annabelle and Sam, will both discuss their latest books and their writing processes at the East Lyme event.

Hood’s latest books share the theme of the pleasure and rewards of reading.

“The Book that Matters Most” deals with a French professor named Ava who is struggling with acclimating to divorce and with worrying over her troubled daughter. She finds some solace when she joins a book club.

After releasing that novel, Hood published a memoir, “Morningstar: Growing up with Books,” this past summer about books that have inspired her.

“‘Morningstar’ grew out of my stupidly not planning that I would get the question, ‘What book matters most to you?’ after I wrote a book called ‘The Book that Matters Most,’” Hood says with a laugh. “I mean, it’s just so obvious, but it never occurred to me. I’m telling you, the first five times I got the question, I couldn’t think of an answer.”

Here’s more of what the engaging, witty Hood had to say during a recent phone interview with The Day.

When she comes to East Lyme, Hood will speak about “the joy and magic of reading and books”:

“I think that they (books) both help us to escape from the world and to understand the world in which we live. They have the power to, of course, on the most basic level, entertain us, but they also have the power to inspire us, change our minds and to heal us, I think. I think part of their magic is that the book you need to read somehow finds its way to you. Most of the time, you’re in charge of what you’re reading, but I think part of the magic of literature is that somebody ether puts a book in your hands or you choose it off a library or bookstore shelf just when you need to read it.”

One of Hood’s memoirs is “Comfort: A Journey Through Grief,” about the death of her 5-year-old daughter, Grace, from a virulent form of strep in 2002. For two years after Grace died, Hood couldn’t read or write, activities that had comforted her before:

“When I needed those double comforts the most, I didn’t have them. My whole life, I had turned to reading to escape or writing to try to figure out the world. At the time when there was nothing I wanted to do more than escape or to help make sense out of the chaos of grief, I didn’t have those things. Now, a wonderful thing that I did get was learning how to knit, which, 15 years later, I’m still doing and still using for that sense of comfort and relaxation. It still soothes me.”

Hood came up with the idea for “The Book that Matters Most” after she visited a book club for her novel “The Obituary Writer”:

“I was coming home — it was about an hour’s drive. For many years, since I wrote the book ‘The Knitting Circle,’ I had been trying to figure out a way to write a book that celebrated reading without it being passive. I had just written a book about people knitting, I didn’t want to write about people reading (she laughs). Next (I’ll be writing about) when people are sleeping. Many years went by, and I wrote two or three other novels before I visited that book club and, driving home, thought, ‘Of course, that’s how you make it energetic — you have a woman in crisis join a book club.’ I had figured out a third or more of the book by the time I had gotten home that night.”

In “The Book that Matters Most,” Ava has a daughter, Maggie, who is living in Europe and develops a heroin addiction:

“I knew Ava was coming out of a midlife divorce and trying to redefine and rediscover herself. But I wanted her to have a kid in some kind of trouble. It took me a little time to land on what I did. I even thought about things like anorexia, drinking, all sorts of stuff. Then I was at a dinner party where two different people — educated, upper middle class, lovely people — had children who were heroin addicts, and it made me think I had missed something that is going on in this country. I read the paper every day, but I really hadn’t realized how heroin had infiltrated everywhere. … I realized if I wanted to create a contemporary teenager in bad trouble, it was likely this is where she’d end up.”

Hood wrote a good deal of her first book, 1987’s “Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine,” while she was a flight attendant. She wrote in longhand in the plane’s galley during transatlantic flights:

“Every, like, 30 minutes, I’d have to get up — we used to carry little flashlights — and we’d walk down the aisle to make sure everybody was alive, basically (she laughs) and (find out) if they wanted a cup of coffee or whatever. But that’s where I did most of my writing. I lived on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, and at the time, to get to Kennedy Airport, there was a subway called The Train to the Plane, and it took about an hour. I would write on that subway, too.”

Growing up, Hood was drawn to reading, even though her family members weren’t readers and didn’t own books:

“I was like an exotic bird to my family … We didn’t have a library (in town) till I was in fifth grade. So I read the back of Froot Loops boxes. I read the Reader’s Digest when it came every month. I read the newspaper every day. I was 6 years old, reading Hints from Heloise, thinking she was the most brilliant woman who ever lived.”

As a child, Hood didn’t have kids her age in her neighborhood, and the cousins she was friendly with were a drive away:

“I was just a kid without a lot of friends around. I was an oddball in school, so kids weren’t flocking to be my friend. I wore glasses. I liked to read. I wasn’t good at playing games on the playground. I sat by myself and played jacks every day at recess. My friends were books, and I think, because of that, I grew into such an avid reader because that’s where I felt the most comfortable in that world.

“By the time I got to ninth grade, I had found my people. I went to a bigger school … I was with other kids who liked to read and do the stuff I did.”

When W.W. Norton was releasing “The Book that Matters Most” in 2016, Hood’s publicist suggested the author visit 60 book clubs during the four months between the book’s release date and Hood’s 60th birthday. Hood ended up doing 77 visits, traveling around the country. After a particularly grueling travel schedule, she considered backing out of a planned trip to a book club in Queens, but she went anyway:

“I immediately fall in love with the book club. It’s run by an 85-year-old matriarch, the same age as my mom, and the book club is just her daughter, her daughters-in-law, her nieces, a couple neighbors. We had this wonderful discussion about ‘The Book that Matters Most.’ What they had done as a surprise to me was they had each brought in the book that had mattered most to them. One person’s … was about a dog, it was one of those early reader books. Another one brought in ‘Jane Eyre.’ Then, the last woman picks up her book, and it’s one I wrote. It’s ‘Comfort: A Journey Through Grief,’ which is my memoir about losing my daughter when she was 5. This woman had lost her son, and she said it was the only book that helped her. At this point, I am sobbing because, first of all, I had thought about not going … It was, like, the seventh (book appearance) that week. It just reminded me that, as writers who spend a lot of time alone, thinking about their books and working on their books, we always have to always remember that it matters to someone out there.”

If you go

Who: Author Ann Hood, along with author Michael Ruhlman

When: 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Oct. 14

Where: East Lyme Community Center, 41 Society Road, East Lyme

Event includes: Luncheon catered by Best of Everything Country Gourmet of Niantic and desserts made by East Lyme Auxiliary of Child and Family Agency; also, book signing and basket raffle

Tickets: $35 in advance, $40 at the door; available at Bank Square Books in Mystic, Book Barn in Niantic, Dime Bank in East Lyme, Bowerbird in Old Lyme

Call: (860) 443-2896

Money raised: All profits from the event will support the Child and Family Agency in its many projects to assist children and families in need of services in mental health and physical healthcare, child abuse prevention, the treatment of family violence, teen pregnancy, childcare, children’s safety and accident prevention, and parent education.