Kit Raine, an American writer living in Tuscany, is working on a biography of her close friend, a complex woman who continues to cast a shadow on Kits own life. Her work is waylaid by the arrival of three womenJulia, Camille, and Susanall of whom have launched a recent and spontaneous friendship that will uproot them completely and redirect their lives. Susan, the most adventurous of the three, has enticed them to subvert expectations of staid retirement...

The best-selling author of BRINGING UP BÉBÉ investigates life in her forties, and wonders whether her mind will ever catch up with her face.

When Pamela Druckerman turns 40, waiters start calling her "Madame," and she detects a new message in mens' gazes: I would sleep with her, but only if doing so required no effort whatsoever. 
Yet forty isn't even technically middle-aged anymore. And there are upsides:...

“Tense, moving, and hilarious . . . [A] dark jewel of a novel.” —Francine Prose, O, The Oprah Magazine

Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and convinced that her...

As dark truths from the past reveal themselves, two middle-aged women must learn to forgive -- for the sake of their children and themselves.

"Celebrated by the Boston Globe as "a brilliant anthropologist of the suburbs," the seductively weird and darkly offbeat Lauren Acampora returns to the lush world that got us all hooked on the NPR Best Book of the Year The Wonder Garden, drawing us into the secret lives of a polished Connecticut haven and jolting us with the sparks that fly when those lives collide. Formerly a model and photographer trying to make it in New York, Louisa Rader is back...

"Gabby and Elliott have been happily married for eighteen years. They have two teenaged daughters; they have built a life together. So why does forty-three-year-old Gabby feel like she has only three more minutes left of youth? Why do her friends so desperately try to hang on to their attractiveness? And why does she ever even look at the handsome guy--ten years younger--at the other end of the bar one night? Gabby is the last person to have an affair--a...

If you've ever been a room parent or school volunteer, Jen Dixon is your hero. She says what every class mom is really thinking, whether in her notoriously frank emails or standup-worthy interactions with the micromanaging PTA President and the gamut of difficult parents. Luckily, she has the charm and wit to get away with it--most of the time. Jen is sassier than ever but dealing with a whole new set of challenges, in the world of parental politics...

Miss Pettigrew, a governess looking for work, is sent by mistake to the home of Delysia LaFosse, a glamorous nightclub singer involved with three different men and is invited to stay after offering Miss LaFosse common sense advice about her love life.

"Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation...