Purchase
G.P. Putnam's Sons
September 2023
On Sale: September 5, 2023
Featuring: Ellie; Mary Alice
336 pages
ISBN: 0593422368
EAN: 9780593422366
Kindle: B09N6M4DKH
Trade Paperback / e-Book
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Other Editions
Hardcover (September 2022)
Fiction Family Life | Small Town | LGBTQ
One of Vanity Fair's Best Books of the Year
A bighearted and moving debut about a wry retired
schoolteacher whose decade-old secret threatens to come to
light and send shockwaves through her small Texas town.
Billington, Texas, is a place where nothing changes.
Well, almost nothing. For the first time in nearly four
decades, Mary Alice Roth is not getting ready for the first
day of school at Billington High. A few months into her
retirement—or, district mandated exile as she calls
it—Mary Alice does not know how to fill her days. The
annual picnic is coming up, but that isn’t nearly
enough since the menu never changes and she had the roles
mentally assigned weeks ago. At least there’s Ellie,
who stops by each morning for coffee and whose reemergence
in Mary Alice’s life is the one thing soothing the
sting of retirement.
Mary Alice and Ellie
were a pair since the day Ellie moved in next door. That
they both were single mothers—Mary Alice widowed,
Ellie divorced—with sons the same age was a pleasant
coincidence, but they were forever linked when they lost the
boys, one right after the other. Years later, the two are
working their way back to a comfortable friendship. But when
Mary Alice’s sister arrives on her doorstep with a
staggering piece of news, it jeopardizes the careful shell
she’s built around her life. The whole of her
friendship with Ellie is put at risk, the fabric of a place
as steadfast as Billington is questioned, and the
unflappable, knotty fixture that is Mary Alice Roth might
have to change after all.
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