Women Friendship

All her life, Summer Sutherland felt like the missing piece in a puzzle, left out and looking for the place she truly belongs. And when an at-home DNA test reveals her selfish mother and well-meaning grandfather lied about her father, Summer sets out to discover the truth. Her new instant family comes with two half sisters: one who accepts her with open arms, the other resistant to the stranger staying in their house. But somehow Summer senses this is where she is meant to be—so she settles into her father’s Carmel home.

Rose has just turned 40 when she gets a call from a lawyer asking her to come to Kyoto for the reading of her estranged father’s will. And so, for the first time in her life, she finds herself in Japan, where Paul, her father’s assistant, is waiting to greet her.As Paul guides Rose along a mysterious itinerary designed by her deceased father, her bitterness and anger are soothed by the stones and the trees in the Zen gardens they move through.

Germaine Johnson doesn’t need a lot of friends. She has her work and her Sudoku puzzles. Until an incident at the insurance company she works for leaves her jobless, and she realizes that there are very few job openings for recently laid-off senior mathematicians with no people skills. With some luck (read: bad luck), Germaine secures a position at city hall answering calls on the Senior Citizens Helpline. But the mayor has something else in mind for Germaine: a secret project involving the troublemakers at the senior citizens’ center and their feud with the neighbouring golf club.

Villa Dolce Vita, a rambling stone house on the Amalfi Coast, sits high above the Gulf of Naples amid dappled lemon groves and fragrant, tumbling bougainvillea. Kim, Colette and Annie all came to the villa in need of escape and in the process forged an unlikely friendship. Now, years later, Kim has transformed the crumbling house into a luxury retreat and has invited her friends back for the summer to celebrate.

Stunned by her recently widowed father’s reckless behavior, a young woman must learn to navigate a new world—where the people she should trust the most have become strangers she cannot trust at all. Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news. She’s met the love of her life, and they’re getting married with a baby on the way. That’s the moment her father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement: at sixty, he’s getting married as well, to Frankie’s best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon.

City dweller Gwen feels like she’s living a secondhand life. She’s thirty-eight, perpetually single, and in dire need of a dentist’s appointment. Her friends are busy procreating in the country, and conversations with her parents seem to revolve entirely around hedge borders and the trash pickup schedule. Above all she’s lonely. But then, isn’t everyone? Then she’s let go from a job she drifted into a decade ago and never left, and Gwen realizes it’s time to make a change, starting with cleaning out her apartment.

In the decade since Emma Dean’s husband died, she’s maintained a peaceful and organized life in her hometown of Wyndham Beach—until she finds evidence of her husband’s longtime affair. How, Emma wonders, can a man who’s been gone for ten years still break her heart? Still reeling from the betrayal, Emma must focus on the group of artists she’s invited to take up residence at the art center she founded, one of whom is secretly seeking refuge from her abusive ex.

After an accident kills Henny, the manager of the Pine Away Motel and Cabins, she watches as the three people who mean the most to her are reunited at her funeral. All three are unhappy, and Henny is devastated to know that she'll have to leave them when they need her the most. But...what if she doesn't have to leave after all? With the funeral over and the last casserole dish packed up and carted home, Henny realizes she has one last opportunity to help her friends discover the happiness they once knew.

The Art of Friendship walks with you into a greater understanding of how God has equipped you to be a friend and to have meaningful friendships. With step-by-step guidance, you will begin to strategize how to fulfill your divine calling as a friend. And through God's Word, as you come to understand the depth and width and breadth of God as Friend, you will discover that the spiritual discipline of friendship is both life-changing and life-giving.

Alice Sullivan feels like she’s finally found her groove in middle age, but it only takes one moment for her perfectly curated life to unravel. On the same day she learns her daughter is struggling in second grade, a call from her son’s school accusing him of bullying throws Alice into a tailspin.

Our culture today is inundated with narratives about the strength of female friendship, whether through images of girl power, BFFs, or work wives. Yet cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith has always found her own life much messier. She has had dramatic friend breakups, friendships that felt like too much or not enough, friendships that drifted into silence, and friendships built on convenience rather than a meeting of minds. And there are older cultural scripts to contend with: the competitive rival, the jealous backstabber, the underminer, the fair-weather friend.

Alone in the world, Tae Holmes and her mother April pretty much raised each other, but as Tae starts asking questions about the father she’s never met, April, for the first time in her life, goes silent. To make matters worse, Tae is dangerously close to broke and just manages to avoid financial meltdown when she lands a shiny new contract with an adventure company for athletes with disabilities and wounded warriors.

Thirty-two-year-old Jess Abbot has lost everything: her job, her apartment, and - most heart-wrenching - her eight-year-old son, Chance, to a tragic accident. Haunted by memories and grief, Jess packs what’s left and heads for the small mountain town of Pine Lake, where she takes a position as caregiver to an eccentric old woman. A rumored clairvoyant, Lucy is strange but welcoming and immediately intuits Jess as a “loose end” in need of closure. But Jess isn’t the only guest in Lucy’s large Victorian home.

Three best friends are going to solve their relationship woes once and for all. Forty-something Jemima’s life is on track - well, sort of. Twenty-something Meagan is in the midst of her five-phase plan and is nearly ready for phase three - a relationship. While 30-something Simi has had more it’s not yous than any I dos. It’s time to play the dating game by their own rules. The catch? They’re playing matchmaker and can only ask out potential dates for each other because the most important rule is that no woman gets left behind.

Can guys and girls ever be just friends? According to Audrey Tate and Clarke West, absolutely. After all, they’ve been best friends since childhood without a single romantic entanglement. Clarke is the charming playboy Audrey can always count on, and he knows that the ever-loyal Audrey will never not play along with his strategy for dodging his matchmaking mother — announcing he’s already engaged…to Audrey.

Connie Darke is trying to run away from the traumas in her past, and it's led her home, to the small rural council estate she left almost 20 years earlier. Matilda Reynolds has spent most of her long life in the Worcestershire village of Stonecastle, and she's content there, with her animals and her solitude. Until a fall lands her in hospital, and Matilda has to turn to her strange young neighbor Connie for help looking after her home. Out of their tentative arrangement, each woman gains a new sense of community.

Adrift in the wake of her father's death, a failed marriage, and multiple miscarriages, Libby McKenzie feels truly alone. Though her new life as a wedding photographer provides a semblance of purpose, it's also a distraction from her profound pain. When asked to photograph a wedding at the historic Woodmont estate, Libby meets the owner, Elaine Grant. Hoping to open Woodmont to the public, Elaine has employed young widower Colton Reese to help restore the grounds and asks Libby to photograph the process.

You'd love to have a "ride or die" posse like you see on social media, but instead you have a host of really good...acquaintances. After all, trying to find a soul friend in the midst of dirty dishes, deadlines, and, oh, a crazy busy life can be overwhelming. But what if developing great friendships was actually easier than we thought? And what if finding a "soul friend" wasn't necessarily our highest goal? In The Life Council, Laura Tremaine tells us what we've been hoping was true all along: making, keeping, and even releasing friends doesn't need to be as hard as we make it.

In a time when many women feel lonely and isolated, Girls' Club calls us to embrace the delight and comfort that can be found in life-giving friendships with women - and to cultivate relationships that not only offer emotional affirmation and acceptance, but also inspire, educate, and stretch us to live out our God-given potential.

It is New Year's Eve when the storm of the century hits northern California. In a quiet neighborhood in San Francisco, amid the chaos of fallen trees and damaged homes, the lives of three strangers are about to collide. For Quinn Thompson, what happens in the storm's wake will bring down a barrier he has built around himself since his wife's death.