Join Us for a Cozy Fall Book Signing — Hot Cider Included!

A fearless debut novel about a women’s cross country team and how far girls will push themselves to control their bodies, friendships, and futures.

Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run deftly illuminates the intensity of female friendship and desire and the nearly impossible standards young women sometimes set for themselves. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls—even those in competition—find ways to love one another and turn feelings of powerlessness into shared strength and self-determination.

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a biblio-memoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Her new book, We Loved to Run, came out in August. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She’s an Idaho native who proudly led the Boise High School girls’ cross country team to a state championship in 1987.