The Red Book

Deborah Copaken Kogan

'Destined to be a classic . . . a sharply funny clear-eyed examination in the vein of Mary McCarthy's The Group of the power and burden of privilege the reality of being a modern woman and the lasting bonds of female friendship.'

Vanity Fair



Can a weekend change your life?



Clover Addison Mia and Jane were college roommates until their graduation in 1989. Now twenty years later their lives are in free fall. Clover once a securities broker with Lehman Brothers living the Manhattan dream is out of a job newly married and fretting about her chances of having a baby. Addison's marriage to a novelist with writers' block is as stale as her artistic 'career'. Mia's acting ambitions never got off the ground and she now stays home with her four children renovating and acquiring faster than her Hollywood director husband can pay the bills. Jane once the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper now the victim of budget cuts has been blindsided by different sorts of loss.



The four friends have kept up with one another via the red book a class report published every five years in which alumni write brief updates about their lives. But there's the story we tell the world and then there's the real story as the classmates arriving at their twentieth reunion with their families their histories their dashed dreams and secret longings will discover over the course of an epoch-ending score-settling unforgettable weekend.
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