Women Friendship

Three women—burdened with small children, unwieldy straw hats, and some obvious emotional issues—tumble onto the Nantucket airport tarmac one hot June day. Vicki is trying to sort through the news that she has a serious illness. Her sister, Brenda, has just left her job after being caught in an affair with a student. And their friend Melanie, after seven failed in vitro attempts, is pregnant at last—but only after learning that her husband is having an affair. They have come to escape, enjoy the sun, and relax in Nantucket's calming air.

Two women’s lives are forever entwined by the love for the same child and by the agonizing choices they will both have to make. A Mother’s Choice will make listeners ask themselves what it truly means to be a parent and whether they could make an ultimately selfless decision when it comes to their child’s future.

With a wife he loves and an exciting London-based career, architect Charles Waterston's life seems in perfect balance. Nothing in his comfortable existence prepares him for the sudden end to his 10-year marriage - or his unwanted transfer to his firm's New York office. With nothing left to lose, Charlie takes a leave of absence from his job to drive through New England, hoping to make peace with himself. Christmas is approaching when Charlie leaves New York, heading to Vermont to ski. But a sudden, blinding snowstorm strands him in a small Massachusetts town.

Lainey has just lost everything. Luckily one little fib (OK, quite a big fib) helps nail her dream job. Soon she's living in a stunning house by the sea, fending off obsessed fans for a retired - if far-from-retiring - actor and organising his charming but chaotic family. Yes, everyone thinks she's part of a couple, and it's tricky keeping this secret. But at least she's not looking for love: with her disastrous relationship history, men are definitely off the agenda.

Since childhood, spending those cherished days with her father in his greenhouse, Rose Fiorni always understood the power of flowers to comfort and uplift a human heart. And now as adult, she needs uplifting bad. Single and unemployed, she’s back living at home with her parents in the old neighborhood along New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her dream airline career is more than grounded. It’s gone for good. At least by moving home she has Vinnie Scorsese, the boy she used to dream of marrying. Her long-time crush on Vinnie is stronger than ever.

From the time she was a little girl with a chocolate stand instead of lemonade, Alice Bailey dreamt of opening a chocolate shop. After all, chocolate heals everything, from heartache to woes. If Alice has learned anything recently, it's that life is precious. It’s now or never - carpe diem time. She's ready to put down roots and live her dreams.

When Connie discovers that Jimmy Diamond, her husband of more than 20 years, is planning to leave her for his office junior, her world is turned upside down. Determined to salvage her pride, she resolves to get her own back. Along with Della, Jimmy's right-hand woman at his cleaning firm, Diamond Shine, and the cleaners who meet at the Sunflower Café, she'll make him wish he had never underestimated her.

Downtown Los Angeles, 1990. Alone in her luxury hotel suite, the reclusive Lacey Crane receives a message: Edith is waiting for her in the lobby. Former best friends, Lacey and Edith haven't spoken to one another in over four decades. As young adults meeting at summer camp in Maine, and later making their way in the glitzy spotlight of postwar Hollywood, Edith and Lacey share a deep-rooted bond that once saved them from isolation and despair, providing comfort from the public and private traumas that they had each endured and which a newly optimistic world was eager to forget

When Emily meets the enigmatic and dazzling actress Tamsin, her life changes. Drawn into Tamsin's world of Soho living, boozy dinners and cocktails at impossibly expensive bars, Emily's life shifts from black-and-white to technicolour, and the two women become inseparable. Tamsin is the friend Emily has always longed for; beautiful, fun, intelligent and mysterious, and soon Emily is neglecting her previous life to bask in her glow. But when a bombshell news article about a decades-old sexual assault case breaks, Emily realises that Tamsin has been hiding a secret about her own past.

When Rachel Bertsche first moves to Chicago, she’s thrilled to finally share a zip code, let alone an apartment, with her boyfriend. But shortly after getting married, Bertsche realizes that her new life is missing one thing: friends. Sure, she has plenty of BFFs—in New York and San Francisco and Boston and Washington, D.C. Still, in her adopted hometown, there’s no one to call at the last minute for girl talk over brunch or a reality-TV marathon over a bottle of wine. Taking matters into her own hands, Bertsche develops a plan....

When Daphne arrives in Berlin, the last thing she expects is to run into more drama than she left behind. Of course, she knew she'd need to do the usual: make friends, acquire lovers, grapple with German and a whole new way of life. She even expected the long nights gorging alone on family-sized jars of Nutella, and the pitfalls of online dating in another language. The paranoia, the second-guessing of her every choice, the covert behaviors? Probably come with the territory. But one night, when Daphne is alone in her apartment, something strange, unnerving and entirely unexpected intervenes.

From the author of the “bighearted...inspiring” (Vogue) memoir Kabul Beauty School comes a fiction debut as compelling as real life: The story of a remarkable coffee shop in the heart of Afghanistan, and the men and women who meet there - thrown together by circumstance, bonded by secrets, and united in an extraordinary friendship. After hard luck and some bad choices, Sunny has finally found a place to call home - it just happens to be in the middle of a war zone. The 38-year-old American’s pride and joy is the Kabul Coffee House.

Christian college Professor Demitria Costanas had vowed to end her affair with a colleague. But she gives into temptation one last time...and a lurking photographer captures her weakness for all to see. Quite literally, she's the woman caught in adultery. And almost everyone - herself included - has a stone to throw. Enter Sullivan Crisp, a decidedly unorthodox psychologist with his own baggage. He's well-known for his quirky sense of humor and incorporation of "game show" theology into his counseling sessions. And yet there's something more he offers...hope for a fresh start.

When her life falls apart on the eve of her 40th birthday, Kate Parker finds herself volunteering at the Lauderdale House for Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 97-year-old Cecily Finn. Cecily's tongue is as sharp as her mind, but she's fed up with pretty much everything. Having no patience with Kate's choices, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book with a difference.

To her millions of fans Molly Ringwald will forever be 16. As the endearing and witty star of the beloved John Hughes classics Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink, Molly defined teenage angst, love, and heartbreak. While remembered eternally as the enviable high school princess Claire, or the shyly vulnerable Samantha, Molly is now a wife and mother, and just celebrated her 40th birthday.

Anna Sarnoff is still reeling from her quickie divorce from tech wunderkind Jake Sarnoff. Forced out of the company that she helped Jake build, Anna is trying to pick up the pieces of her life, navigating the waters of solo parenting their two teenage boys and adapting to her new role of ex-wife. To make things more complicated, Jake seems to want her back…and his persuasiveness tempts her to say yes.

Keen to put the spark back into her life, Annie Lovell volunteers to investigate her neighbour’s inherited apartment in Paris. There she discovers a bundle of secret diaries hidden within its walls. Captivated by the City of Light, Annie must piece together the events from the past if she is to fulfil the legacy that Beatrice left for her to find....

Best friend, old friend, good friend, BFF, college roommate, neighbor, workplace confidante: women's friendships are lifelines in times of trouble and support systems for daily life. A friend can be like a sister, daughter, mother, mentor, therapist, or confessor - or she can be all of these at once. She's seen you at your worst and celebrates you at your best. Figuring out what it means to be friends is, in the end, no less than figuring out how we connect to other people.

At 40, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she's turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm's length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one by one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey.

In this charming and poignant novel that "oozes charm and wit and speaks beautifully about friendship and love, and the differences between the two" (Laura Pearson, author of I Wanted You to Know), teenager Emmie Blue releases a balloon with her email address and a big secret into the sky, only to fall head-over-heels for the boy who finds it. But 14 years later, everything Emmie has planned is up in the air.