Joanna Trollope

For years Lizzie has given her twin sister Frances an inferiority complex. Both are English career women, but Lizzie is married with four children. One day Frances falls in love with a Spaniard. He refuses to leave his wife, but Frances decides to have a baby anyway, moving to Spain to be a single mother. At which point Lizzie's life begins crumbling from envy. By the author of The Rector's Wife.

"It's Eleanor who starts the Friday night get-togethers. From her window she sees two young women with small children, separate, struggling, and plainly lonely--and decides to ask them in. Gradually a group of six different and disparate women forms. They range in age from Jules, who is twenty-two and wants to be a DJ, to Eleanor herself, who is a retired professional and walks with a cane. They include one wife, three mothers, and five working...

David and Nathalie, adopted and raised by the same parents but born to different mothers, decide, in their thirties, to begin a painful journey to find their birth mothers, affecting their spouses, children, and co-workers.

After her youngest son, and last one to marry, brings home his wife, Rachel feels her role of family matriarch slipping away and must deal with the loss that comes with it, while maintaining the relationships she holds dear.

The day Stacey Grant loses her job feels like the last day of her life. Or at least, the only life she'd ever known. For who was she if not a City high-flyer, Senior Partner at one of the top private equity firms in London? As Stacey starts to reconcile her old life with the new - one without professional achievements or meetings, but instead, long days at home with her dog and ailing mother, waiting for her successful husband to come home - she at...