Best friends for nearly twenty years, three women, all with the same birthday, plan to get together at a summerhouse in Maine to celebrate their approaching fortieth birthdays by taking stock of their lives, loves, choices, and dreams.

Growing up under an assumed identity after accidentally shooting her mother and escaping her abusive father, Liza Barton, still fearful that her past will reclaim her, is shocked when her husband inadvertently buys her childhood home.

Believing her marriage to Andy to be perfect in every way, Ellen runs into former flame Leo and wonders why she has been unable to forget him even though they brought out the worst in each other.

Growing up desolate under the eye of a resentful great-aunt on an Iowa farm, Marie-Ange Hawkins dreams of returning to the French chateau where she lived before she was orphaned, but when she finally does so, she learns a devastating truth.

"Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright...Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University,...

Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can't move. She can't speak. She can't open her eyes. Though she can hear everyone around her, no one knows because she's in a coma. But she doesn't remember what happened. And she has a sneaking suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, the narratives build and collide for an...

Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway, occupied with the last-minute details of party preparation, finds her thoughts on a very different route through the past.

"A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey"--