The Most Fun We Ever Had

Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s with no idea what the decades ahead will cost them. By 2016 their four daughters are all unsettled, and each privately measures her own life against her parents' marriage.

Wendy is widowed young and numbs herself with drink and younger men. Violet, a former litigator now at home with her children, fights anxiety as the darkest part of her past resurfaces.

Liza, a newly tenured professor, is pregnant by a man she is not sure she loves. Grace, the youngest, has started living a lie that nobody in the family suspects.

The trigger is the arrival of Jonah Bendt, whom one of the sisters gave up in a closed adoption fifteen years earlier. The main action covers the year that follows. The narrative also moves back through the family's history across nearly fifty years.

The setting is Chicago and its well-off suburbs. The family saga moves between present-day crisis and the past: adolescence, infidelity and resentment on one side, bright moments of joy on the other. Humor runs alongside the hurt, and the attention stays on how sisters, parents and children irritate and need one another.