Between Friends

Jillian Lawton and Lesley Adamski become friends in the 1950s, in the years after the Second World War. As girls they are close, but as they grow up, their choices and their mistakes send them down very different roads.

Lesley becomes pregnant and marries young. Her days are filled with small children and money worries, and her husband is unfaithful. Jillian spends those same years on a college campus unsettled by the Vietnam War, then works as an idealistic young lawyer in New York City.

The novel follows the two women across decades and long distances. Marriage, children, divorce and widowhood come to both of them in turn, and each shares her griefs and her joys with the other. Neither keeps secrets from her friend.

This is women's fiction built around one long friendship. It tracks two contrasting lives side by side as they unfold over time. The focus stays on the bond between the pair rather than on any single event. Readers who want a character-driven story of ordinary life across several decades will find it here.