Book Club

The book club has met for years, and for years it has been the one fixed point in five women's lives. Then Eve's husband dies without warning and leaves her with nothing settled; Annie, ready at last for a child, finds her health and her marriage in the way; Doris keeps up appearances while refusing to see what her husband is doing; Gabriella cannot make the money stretch; and Midge's mother arrives to disturb the peace she built alone.

What holds them together is not the books so much as the habit of showing up. Across a year of small catastrophes, the group becomes the thing each of them leans on, and each has to decide what independence is actually going to cost.

A standalone novel of women's friendship from Mary Alice Monroe, first published in 1999 and reissued since.