“This quirky wonderful book is a paean to friendship and love and creativity. I couldn’t put it down. I felt uplifted on every page. For readers who loved 84 Charing Cross Road, Three Guesses is a delightful successor.” —Martha Anne Toll, author of Three Muses and Duet for One

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“Three strangers linked by chance through a mysterious painting forge an unlikely friendship in a years-long exchange of letters. Ghosts haunt this story—missing parents, palpable absences, destructive pasts that hover over the characters’ present lives. Identities are assumed, then shed; running away becomes running toward. In Three Guesses, Chris McClain Johnson has crafted a novella that is a song to the groundedness and salvation that human connection provides.” —Cynthia Reeves, author of The Last Whaler and Falling Through the New World

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“In a day of instant communication and surface relationships, it is refreshing to read of a deep connection that evolves through old-fashioned ‘snail mail.’ Chris McClain Johnson weaves a gentle, slow-building ode to the transformative power of the written word in this lovely novella. She deftly draws readers into three distinct characters’ lives, and the result is a testament not only to the power of words, but also to the healing prospect of genuine, authentic friendship. I didn’t want it to end.” —Tracey D. Buchanan, author of Toward the Corner of Mercy and Peace

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“In Chris McClain Johnson’s wildly entertaining and smart epistolary novella, Three Guesses, an unpredictable friendship is forged between three unlikely characters. When they meet, each is like a “lost character” in a story or “missing comma” in a poem, yet through their honest exchanges, they not only find each other but themselves. Frequently lyrical and rife with poems and stories, this intimate and funny book is filled with longing and heart. One of the three characters writes: “We’re all falling all the time. Some of us are lucky enough to have someone or something to catch us before we hit the ground.” This at first hapless trio discovers they are not only willing, but able and eager to catch each other, and they not only catch but enthrall readers too. This book will move you. It will make you both plummet and rise with the love and hope strangers can and should bring to each other’s lives. Three Guesses, restores and reinforces faith in humanity.” —Deirdre Fagan, author of Find a Place for Me and Phantom Limbs

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“Chris Johnson brings back the art of letter writing in her novella Three Guesses. I found myself totally involved with the characters as she brought them to life in each letter. Through these correspondences the characters develop and intrigue us even more. Over the years you come to know each person and relate to their joys and pains. There is a feeling of realness and sincerity as you follow their lives in each letter. Three Guesses reminds us friendship, and family, can be found in the most unusual ways.” —Jodie Vance, publisher of Memphis Downtowner magazine

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“An epistolary celebration of creativity, art, and the written word, Three Guesses is an enchanting treat of a novella. I absolutely adored it. When a bored temp worker sends an illicit letter to both an artist and to a man who owns one of his paintings, these three very different people start a correspondence that develops into an unlikely friendship. Only communicating through the mail, this odd trio will come to sustain each other in the most unexpected ways. With vivid, poetic storytelling and warm humor, Chris McClain Johnson weaves their loneliness and longing into a life-affirming and joyful tapestry of connection. Warning, you might find happy tears rolling down your cheeks as you turn the last page.” —Jennifer Oko, author of Just Emilia, New York Times Editors’ Choice Lying Together, and Marie Claire Book of the Month Gloss

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“Chris McClain Johnson’s beautiful novella, Three Guesses, immerses us in the lives of strangers linked by a painting (the Three Guesses of the title)—a young temp worker, the painting’s owner, and the artist. In the letters that comprise the book, the three characters are at first distant and awkward, but eventually they transcend issues surrounding the painting and reveal with depth and honesty the joys and sorrows, the loves and heartbreaks in their lives. In a time when letter writing has become virtually a lost art, something magical occurs within their long, letter-writing relationship, just as something magical occurs for us in the reading: Three Guesses is a tribute to the lasting value of the written word and to friendship.” —Gerry Wilson, author of That Pinson Girl

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“Upon moving to Hatteras Island, one of Chris McClain Johnson’s narrators asks, “Have you ever stood on a raw stretch of beach with the wind blowing sand so hard it stings your legs? I can see now how islands move, how dunes are created, how they shift, how people come to places like this and never leave.” I’d planned to dip into Three Guesses and read just for a little a bit, but the magic of the epistolary genre, that intrigue of nib-nosing into someone else’s letters, was already tugging me along. The narrators, three people bound together by a chance encounter with a painting, communicate at first tersely and then with graduating levels of intimacy and openness. By the time one of them moves to Hatteras, I knew I didn’t stand a chance of closing the book. Sam, Richard, and Pete’s lives mirror the shifting sands of the island, swirling and dissolving, yet coming back together as a chosen family, coming back together to live on shifting sands, finally anchored.” —Heather Frese, author of The Saddest Girl on the Beach

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