Jenna Bush Hager has announced that Friends and Strangers is her July book club pick!
Friends and Strangers comes from the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions and focuses on a complicated friendship between two women who are at two very different stages in life.
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 Courtney Sullivan comments on her book: "What happens in the world of this novel is what happens in the world, which is that people living along every point of the spectrum of privilege are thrown together and have to navigate how to coexist even as these disparities kind of hover in the background."
We can't wait to read the book that Jenna describes as "hilarious as it is insightful and paints an authentic picture of modern motherhood and the power of female friendship."
