On the day they first meet in a city playground, Deborah Laidlaw lends Toby Ruben a book called Trolley Girl, the memoir of a forgotten trolley strike in the 1920s, written by the sister of a fiery Jewish revolutionary who played an important, ultimately tragic role in the events. Young mothers with babies, Toby and Deborah become instant friends. It is a relationship that will endure for decades—through the vagaries of marriage, career,

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Depicts the experiences of eight Vassar graduates during the thirty years following their graduation.

"An edgy and haunting debut novel about a group of friends who reunite after one of them has returned from a mysterious two-year disappearance. Julie is missing, and the missing don't often return. But Elise knows Julie better than anyone, and she feels in her bones that her best friend is out there, and that one day she'll come back. She's right. Two years to the day that Julie went missing, she reappears with no memory of where she's been or what...

This irresistible debut, set in contemporary New York, provides a sharp, insightful look into how the relationship between two best friends changes when they are no longer coming of age but learning how to live adult lives.As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.Sarah, the only child...

When tragedy threatens to tear her family apart, Margot Matthews discovers that her friendship with the new female pastor and her quilting sisterhood are the only things holding her together as she tries to piece back together her life.

"In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother's endless grievances, Ellie dreams of a friend to alleviate her isolation. Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind, passionate girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in...

A time to think about lives lived, choices made. A time for friends... Every week, four women have an unmissable appointment in their calendars: they meet for breakfast. Clare has just been through a devastating divorce. She's driven by anger and revenge-until she learns something that forces her to question her own actions and to look deep inside for the person she used to be. Elizabeth is a successful professional. A widow, she's determined...

Covens. Girl Bands. Ballet troupes. Convents. In all times and places, girls and women have come together in communities of vocation, of necessity, of support. In Witches, Sam George-Allen explores how wherever women gather, magic happens. Female farmers change the way we grow our food. Online beauty communities democratize skin-care rituals. And more than any other demographic, it's teen girls that shape our culture. Patriarchal societies have long...

Since the publication of My Brilliant Friend, the first of the Neapolitan novels, Elena Ferrante's fame as one of our most compelling, insightful, and stylish contemporary authors has grown enormously. She has gained admirers among authors--Jhumpa Lahiri, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Messud, to name a few--and critics--James Wood, John Freeman, Eugenia Williamson, for example. But her most resounding success has undoubtedly been with readers, who have...

An intense friendship between the wealthy, manipulative Kat and the financially and emotionally struggling Alice takes a disturbing turn when Kat's loutish husband tumbles from the balcony of their mansion home and new revelations come to light.