Women Friendship

Most days, Magda is fine. She has her routines. She has her anxious therapy patients, who depend on her to cure their bad habits. She has her longtime colleagues, whose playful bickering she mediates. She’s mourning the recent loss of her best friend, Sara, but has brokered a tentative truce with Sara’s prickly widower as she helps him sort through the last of Sara’s possessions. She’s fine. But in going through Sara’s old journal, Magda discovers her friend’s last directive: plans for a road trip they would take together in celebration of Magda’s upcoming seventieth birthday.

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.

A decade ago, Ella Brooke's older sister, Miranda, vanished without a trace. With every passing year, Ella has come to resemble more closely the sister she lost - the same dark hair, the same piercing blue eyes - and now she's the same age Miranda was when she disappeared. Ella has never let go of her sister. She can still feel Miranda's presence, still hear her voice. She still talks to her. What holds Ella together is her love for her sister's 10-year-old son and her work as a self-defense expert helping victims.

London, 1940. After her fiancé breaks off their engagement, Evelyn decides to do her part for the war effort by signing up for construction work on Waterloo Bridge. Grieving after her little boy dies in an air raid, Gwen is completely lost when her husband sends their younger children to the countryside for safety. Enlisting as a construction worker, she is partnered with cheerful Evelyn. The two women strike up a heartwarming friendship.

Childhood friends Hannah, Maya, Blue, and Renee share a bond that feels more like family. Growing up, they had difficult home lives, and the summers they spent together in Montauk were the happiest memories they ever made. Then, the summer after graduation, one terrible night changed everything. Twelve years have passed since that fateful incident, and their sisterhood has drifted apart, each woman haunted by her own lost innocence. But just as they reunite in Montauk for one last summer, hoping to find happiness once more, tragedy strikes again.

Kara Sullivan’s life is full of love - albeit fictional. As a best-selling romance novelist and influential bookstagrammer, she’s fine with getting her happily-ever-after fix between the covers of a book.

We all know someone like Becca. She has the job everyone wants, a designer wardrobe, a hot-shot lawyer boyfriend, holidays to exotic locations. And she flaunts her perfect life all over social media. It drove her colleague Lizzie mad, but she couldn't stop looking. They were never really friends - and yet Lizzie knew everything about her. Or did she? When chance and a terrible mistake pull Lizzie back into Becca's orbit years after they lost touch, she'll realise that you can't always believe what you see online...and that finding out the truth might be the worst thing you can do.

This beautifully written account of a woman's unique relationship with an exceptional dog is called Please Let Me Tell You About My Moose. It's a heartwarming memoir that serves as a reminder that real friendship is indispensable, there is a reason for everything, and genuine love never dies.

For Eve, Irene, Betty, and Rosemary, working at the exclusive Heyworth's department store in Cambridge is a dream come true. Once the girls step inside the elegant building, the hardships of their own lives are temporarily forgotten. Serving a variety of customers, from glamorous gypsy queens to royalty and the city's fashionable elite, the store is a place where these young women can forge successful careers under the ever-watchful eye of flamboyant owner Mr Heyworth.

Moira Wellman has always loved makeovers - helping women find their most beautiful selves. Funny how it’s taken her five years with her abusive boyfriend, Lang, to realize she needs a life makeover. When Moira finally gets the courage to leave Lang, the beachside town of Moonlight Harbor is the perfect place to start over. Soon, Moira is right at home, working at Waves Salon, making new friends, and helping her clients find new confidence. When she meets a handsome police officer, she’s more than willing to give him a free haircut. Maybe even her heart.

Mariners Island is barely ten miles long, but when Ivy, Ariana and Cam were teenagers, it was their whole world. Beyond the pristine beaches and iconic lighthouse lies the beautiful old library that belongs to Ivy’s family. While that bound Ivy to the island as an adult, Ariana could not leave Mariners behind fast enough. The town holds too many…memories. Not only her unrequited feelings for Cam, but the tragedy that left a scar on the community. When a young girl went missing, a teenage Cam was unthinkably the prime suspect.

Three women, from coast to coast and in between, open their mailboxes to the same intriguing invitation. Although leading entirely different lives, each has found herself at a similar, jarring crossroads. Right when these women thought they’d be comfortably settling into middle age, their carefully curated futures have turned out to be dead ends.

Women long for deep and lasting friendships but often find them challenging to make. The private angst they feel regarding friendship often translates into their own insecurity and isolation. Christine Hoover offers women a fresh, biblical vision for friendship that allows for the messiness of our lives and the realities of our schedules.

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! is the funny, serious, and compelling new novel by Fannie Flagg, author of the beloved Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (and prize-winning co-writer of the classic movie). Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.

Are you consumed with a busy life but unsure how to slow down? Do you desire connection within your community and think, Absolutely, but I don't have time for that or I can't create that? What if there was another way through it all, a way to find those moments of peace and to create a time for honest, comfortable connection? What if meeting neighbors and connecting with friends was as simple as showing up and being available?

Isobel Johnson has spent her career in Liston Heights sidestepping the community’s high-powered families. But when she receives a threatening voicemail accusing her of anti-Americanism and a liberal agenda, she’s in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Julia Abbott, obsessed with the casting of the school’s winter musical, makes an error in judgment that has far-reaching consequences for her entire family.

The rollicking tale of a young jewelry shop owner who accidentally leads her Instagram followers to believe that she’s engaged - and then decides to keep up the ruse.

It’s time to deck the halls! The holidays have arrived in Friendship Harbor, Maine, and pub owner Sophie LaFleur is eager for the extra tourism money to save her struggling business. With her pet llama the star of the school Christmas pageant, Fleece Navidad, and a pub holiday party in the works, it’s going to be a holiday to remember. Especially when the out-of-town choral vocalist staying in Sophie’s guesthouse is found dead. She’s hit her last high note, and now it's up to Sophie to solve her murder while ensuring everyone in town is having a holly jolly good time.

When Sophie LaFleur left Hollywood and her acting career for the quaint, coastal town of Friendship Harbor, Maine, she expected ocean breezes, friendly neighbors and a relaxing way of life. What she didn’t expect was the theft of her beloved, pet llama—but then again, she never expected quite so much murder either. And L.A. was supposed to be dangerous.