Excellent Women is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel...

Jennifer Weiner's talent shines like never before in this collection of short stories, following the tender, often hilarious, progress of love and relationships over the course of a lifetime. We meet Marlie Davidow, home alone with her new baby late one night, when she wanders onto her ex's online wedding registry and wonders what if she had wound up with the guy not taken. We find Jessica Norton listing her beloved river-view apartment in the hope...

"What happened was this: Jenny Slate was a human mammal who sniffed the air every morning hoping to find another person to love who would love her, and in that period there was a deep dark loneliness that she had to face and befriend, and then we are pleased to report that she did fall in love, and in that period she was like chimes, or a flock of clean breaths, and her spine lying flat was the many-colored planks on the xylophone, but also she was...

Returning in disgrace to her mother's home after an affair with her professor, temperamental Willie arrives at the same time the remains of a prehistoric creature are discovered in the town's lake, a finding that leads to painful revelations about Willie's family.

"Catalina Martin desperately needs a date to her sister's wedding. Especially since her little white lie about her American boyfriend has spiralled out of control. Now everyone she knows--including her ex and his fiancaee--will be there and eager to meet him. She only has four weeks to find someone willing to cross the Atlantic and aid in her deception. New York to Spain is no short flight and her raucous family won't be easy to fool. Enter Aaron...

Despite the oddballs that keep turning up on her dates, Anna couldn't be happier. As a 30-something with a job she loves, life has turned out better than she dared dream. However, things weren't always this way, and her years spent as the butt of schoolyard jokes are ones she'd rather forget. So when James Fraser - the architect of Anna's final humiliation at school - walks back into her life, her world is turned upside down. But James seems a changed...

Let's be honest. No woman really wants to be alone for the rest of her life. But does being alone mean you're doomed to be miserable forever? Definitely not! And does being single have to equal lonely? No way! You can have the best time of your life when you're single, but you wouldn't know that from our relationship obsessed society, where celebrity magazines devote the majority of their content to who's dating whom and the wedding industry is a...

Follows Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose coming-of-age experiences mirror the broader cultural development of her times.

When Ros steps off a plane after three years away, she's in need of a new job, a new flat and a new start. But her friends have moved on, her parents only have eyes for each other, and her bedroom has been moved into the garden shed. Suddenly, Ros has a bad case of nostalgia for the way things were.Then her phone begins to ping with messages from her old life. Including one number she thought she'd erased forever: the man who broke her heart. Sometimes...

The story of a middle-aged spinster who moves to a country village to escape her controlling relatives and takes up the practice of witchcraft.