Friends and Strangers, J. Courtney Sullivan
8 Rating(s)
List: $25.00 | Sale: $18.00
Club: $12.50

Friends and Strangers
A novel

Bestseller

Narrator: Kate Rudd

Unabridged: 14 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/30/2020


Synopsis

An insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life, from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions (named one of the Washington Post's Ten Best Books of the Year and a New York Times Critics' Pick).

Elisabeth, an accomplished journalist and new mother, is struggling to adjust to life in a small town after nearly twenty years in New York City. Alone in the house with her infant son all day (and awake with him much of the night), she feels uneasy, adrift. She neglects her work, losing untold hours to her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group, her "influencer" sister's Instagram feed, and text messages with the best friend she never sees anymore. Enter Sam, a senior at the local women's college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she's always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. She's worried about student loan debt and what the future holds. In short order, they grow close. But when Sam finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Elisabeth's father-in-law, the true differences between the women's lives become starkly revealed and a betrayal has devastating consequences.

A masterful exploration of motherhood, power dynamics, and privilege in its many forms, Friends and Strangers reveals how a single year can shape the course of a life.

Author Bio

American author, J. Courtney Sullivan, has been very successful in her writing career. She has written several novels, mostly concerning the relationships among women. She is a self-proclaimed feminist, which explains her choice of themes for her books, both fiction and non-fiction. Sullivan comes from an Irish-Catholic heritage, where women identify by their middle name instead of first names. She had one piece published for Allure magazine under "Courtney Sullivan", but added the J. back in from then forward. She was raised near Boston, Massachusetts, and attended Smith College, majoring in Victorian Literature and received awards for her short stories, and for her work in Women's Studies.

Sullivan graduated from Smith in 2003, after which she moved to New York City to begin working for Allure magazine. After Allure, she worked at The New York Times for four years. Now, her work has made The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, New York magazine, New York Observer, Men's Vogue, Elle, and Glamour. In 2006, she wrote for the New York Times a column entitled, "Modern Love", that described her experiences in the dating world. Sounds like Sara Jessica Parker's character, Carrie Bradshaw, in "Sex and the City".

Her NYT bestselling novels are: Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occassions. Her work has been celebrated with her receiving many different, prestigious literary awards. Her novel, The Engagements, is to be a major motion picture produced by Reese Witherspoon and distributed by Fox 2000.

Sullivan lives with her husband and their son in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, NY.

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