Women Friendship

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. When Eliza Hunt created the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board 15 years ago, she was happily entrenched in her picture-perfect suburban life with her husband and twin preschoolers. Now, with an empty nest and a crippling case of agoraphobia, the once-fun hobby has become her lifeline. So, when a rival parenting forum threatens the site’s existence, she doesn’t think twice before fabricating a salacious rumor to spark things up a bit. It doesn’t take long before that spark becomes a flame.

Anna Moore didn’t just wake up one day and decide to go on a wild quest—especially since her life no longer lends itself to wild anything—so how in the world does she end up racing against the clock with Owen Harris, a sexy, enigmatic adventurist, to prove her beloved dad innocent of stealing a million-dollar necklace?

Summer Sullivan, the youngest founding member of Elm Creek Quilts, has spent the last two years pursuing a master’s degree in history at the University of Chicago. Her unexpected return home to the celebrated quilter’s retreat is met with delight but also concern from her mother, Gwen; her best friend, Sarah; master quilter Sylvia; and her other colleagues—and rightly so. Stymied by writer’s block, Summer hasn’t finished her thesis, and she can’t graduate until she does. vElm Creek Manor offers respite while Summer struggles to meet her extended deadline.

In India, Smita is an untouchable. Desperate to give her daughter an education, she takes the child and flees her small village with nothing but her resourcefulness, eventually heading to a temple where she will experience a rebirth. In Sicily, Giulia works in her father’s wig workshop, the last of its kind in Palermo. She washes, bleaches, and dyes the hair provided by the city’s hairdressers, which is now in short supply. But when her father is the victim of a serious accident, she discovers that the company’s financial situation is dire.

World War II has just ended, and Britain has established the Control Commission for Germany, which oversees their zone of occupation. The Control Commission hires British civilians to work in Germany, rebuild the shattered nation, and prosecute war crimes. Somewhat aimless, bored with her job as a provincial schoolteacher, and unwilling to live with her overbearing mother any longer, 30-something Edith Graham applies for a job with the Commission - but she is also recruited by her cousin Leo, who is in the Secret Service.

Isabelle “Izzy” Flanders and Yoko Akia are beginning a new project—an indoor-outdoor café that will be the cornerstone of a market village. Izzy knows just the person to get the project off the ground: her old college classmate, Zoe Danfield, now vice president of a huge construction corporation. But the Zoe that Izzy reencounters doesn’t seem like her confident old friend. This Zoe is stressed, and Izzy eventually learns why. Buildings and bridges have been collapsing all over the world, causing hundreds of deaths, and Zoe suspects her firm’s inferior foundation materials are the cause.

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.

When Claire Barclay receives news that her beloved stepfather has had a stroke, she's more than a little shaken. Leo is her last real relative, and his own children rarely check up on the old man. Claire and her husband, Art, leave New York and fly back to Scotland to care for him during the summer. Their visit makes clear that Leo is no longer capable of living on his own, but he is determined to stay in his beloved old house. Art comes up with the idea of turning the place into a conference center, thinking they could purchase the place from Leo and build him a cottage on the property.

At 26, apprentice baker Mia West has her entire life planned out: a Craftsman cottage in Seattle, a job baking at the Butter Emporium, and her first love - her boyfriend, Ethan - by her side. But when Ethan declares he “needs some space”, Mia’s carefully planned future crumbles. Feeling adrift, Mia joins her vivacious housemate Rosie on a humanitarian trip around the world funded by a reclusive billionaire.

Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur; Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual; and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather at Sylvie’s old beach house - not for festivities this time, but to clean it out before it is sold. Can they survive together without her?

Eighteen months ago, Autumn Divac's husband went missing. Her desperate search has yielded no answers—she still has no idea where he went or why. After being happily married for twenty years, she can't imagine moving forward without him, but for the sake of their two teenage children, she has to try. Autumn takes her kids home for the summer to the charming beachside town where she was raised. She seeks comfort by working alongside her mother and aunt at their bookshop, only to learn that her daughter is facing a life change and her mother has been hiding a terrible secret.

Cinnamon Haynes has fought hard for a life she never thought was possible—a good man by her side, a steady job as a career counselor at a local community college, and a cozy house in a quaint little beach town. It may not look like much, but it’s more than she ever dreamed of or what her difficult childhood promised. Her life’s mantra is to be good, quiet, grateful. Until something shifts and Cinnamon is suddenly haunted by a terrifying question: “Is this all there is?”

Longtime personal assistant Georgie Mulcahy has made a career out of putting others before herself. When an unexpected upheaval sends her away from her hectic job in L.A. and back to her hometown, Georgie must confront an uncomfortable truth: her own wants and needs have always been a disconcertingly blank page. But then Georgie comes across a forgotten artifact—a "friendfic" diary she wrote as a teenager, filled with possibilities she once imagined. To an overwhelmed Georgie, the diary's simple, small-scale ideas are a lifeline-a guidebook for getting started on a new path.

Four women, all from very different lives, all with reason to step into the water and wash away their past. But will the friendship they build be enough to keep them afloat when they each must face their fears?

When 99-year-old heiress Josephine Bettendorf Warrick summons Brooke Trappnell to Talisa Island, her 20,000-acre remote barrier island home, Brooke is puzzled. Everybody in the South has heard about the eccentric millionaire mistress of Talisa, but Brooke has never met her. Over the course of a few meetings, Josephine spins a tale of old friendships, dark secrets, betrayal, and a long-unsolved murder. She wants Brooke to help her make amends with the heirs of the women who were her closest friends....

Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today, says a character in Sigrid Nunez’s ninth novel. The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

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.

Meet Darryl Graham, or as his new neighbors call him, The Man in 3B. Darryl's new to the Jamaica, Queens building, but from day one he's made quite an impression on his neighbors. He has made it very clear he greatly values his privacy, but he is the man every woman wants and every man wants to be, so inquiring minds want to know. Unfortunately, in Darryl's world, what you know can hurt you. And when he winds up dead, those inquiring minds become the prime suspects.

When a group of friends in Mason, Missouri, decide to start a monthly supper club, they get more than they bargained for. The plan for congenial evenings - talking, laughing, and sharing recipes, homemade food, and wine - abruptly changes course one night when one of the women reveals something startlingly intimate. The supper club then becomes Confession Club, and the women gather weekly to share not only dinners but embarrassing misdeeds, deep insecurities, and long-held regrets.

Living on the island of Cyprus, Nisha is far from her native Sri Lanka. Though she longs to return home, she knows that working as a nanny and maid for a wealthy widow is the only way to earn enough to support her daughter, left behind to be raised by relatives. Yiannis is a poacher, trapping the tiny protected songbirds that stop in Cyprus as they migrate each year from Africa to Europe and selling them on the illegal market. He dreams of finding a new way of life, and of marrying Nisha.