Sue Miller

"Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for 15 years, Frankie Rowley has come home--home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father's slow failing and her mother's desperation, another house burns,...

This is a story about marriage and the friendship of Meri, newly married and pregnant and Delia, the wife of a senator whose chronic infidelity is well known in Washington circles.

For Eva, the divorced and happily remarried mother of three children, and her adolescent middle child, Daisy, the death of Eva's second husband John in a car accident turns their lives upside down.

An old woman debilitated by illness moves in with her son. She is a writer who made a name for herself with feminists for getting rid of her husband, but her children have always condemned her for it. The novel looks at the way the son's resentment affects his own wife and children.