From the best-selling author of Maine and Saints for All Occasions, J. Courtney Sullivan's Friends and Strangers is an insightful, hilarious, and compulsively readable novel about 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.

J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, and Saints For All Occasions. A Massachusetts native, Courtney now lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two children.

ROBIN YOUNG brings more than 25 years of broadcast experience to her role as host of Here & Now. She is a Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker who has also reported for NBC, CBS and ABC television and for several years was substitute host and correspondent for The Today Show. Robin was born on New York’s Long Island, attended Ithaca College in upstate New York and has lived and worked in Manhattan, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, but Boston is her hub.

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