Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781668021606
Format: Trade paperback (US)
Year: 2024
Publisher: Simon & Schuster


Description:
Hailed as “richly intimate” and “wickedly delightful” (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one woman’s affair with her daughter’s best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition.




It’s the opening night, but Alice’s performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winter’s Tale is far from glamourous. She doesn’t have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isn’t exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming.




Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high school—really one another’s only friend—but now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friend’s support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine.




A professor of women’s and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celine’s landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but she’s struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alice’s play, she relents, if only to escape writer’s block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alice’s performance and realizes that her daughter’s once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman.




Set over the course of decades—from Alice and Sadie’s early friendship days and Celine’s decision to leave her h