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Like many a modern, well-travelled woman, Rosie has lived a fascinating life, full of adventure and the pleasure of many lovers in her younger years. Now, facing the challenges of middle-age, she finds that the things that defined her most -- work, love, independence -- begin to fail her. She comes home to Ireland to care for her elderly aunt Min, trapped by circumstances in sleepy Dublin. But when an opportunity arises to visit New York again, the...

Jeanne Bridgeton, an unmarried executive in her late forties, discovers life doesn't begin and end on a spreadsheet when her expected menopause instead becomes an unexpected pregnancy. Though accomplished at managing risk professionally, Jeanne realizes her skills don't extend to her personal life, where she has allowed the professional and the personal to become intertwined. She's not even sure which of two men in her life is the father. Worse yet,...

Having lived in a dozen different towns due to her husband's frequent corporate relocations, Joanna leaves her husband to return to the coastal South Carolina community she loves, while Paul, distraught by Joanna's abandonment, endeavors to win her back.

Tom and Annie's children have grown up, the mortgage is doable and they're about to get a kitchen makeover. But beneath the veneer of professional success and domestic security, their marriage is crumbling, eaten away by years of resentment, loneliness, and misunderstandings. Then the economy falls apart and their lives are upended when Tom loses his job. Is it possible, they ask themselves, to start again?

"In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she's as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned. In "The Patron Saints of Middle Age," a woman visits two friends she hasn't seen since her divorce. In "A for Alone," a married middle-aged artist embarks on a creative...

"Midwife Martha Cade has decided. When he returns in February, she is going to marry Mayor Thomas Dillon. That is the only decision in life in which she feels confident these days. Everything else around her feels like it's changing too fast, from her daughter's obvious affection for the town's young doctor to Martha realizing she's ready to pass on her role as midwife to someone younger. Even her beloved town of Trinity is changing. The 1830s Pennsylvania...

"Helen Decatur spent a lifetime setting goals--getting through college and law school, opening her own practice, becoming financially secure, and establishing herself as one of the most highly respected divorce attorneys in the state of South Carolina. Achieving those goals was a breeze compared to the one she's faced with now. The most driven--and cynical--of the Sweet Magnolias, Helen is forty-two, single and suddenly ready for the family she's...

Rich and Sandy were once environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, twenty-five years later, they have both settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle age, although they've gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie. When Rich decides to take Sophie, whom he hardly knows, on a trek into the Tasmanian...

"Judy never intended to start wearing the dog. But when she stumbled across her son Teddy's old baby sling during a halfhearted basement cleaning, something in her snapped. So: the dog went into the sling, Judy felt connected to another living being, and she's repeated the process every day since. Wickedly funny and surprisingly tender, Separation Anxiety offers a frank portrait of middle-aged limbo, examining the ebb and flow of life's most important...