“Utterly compelling, wickedly funny, and achingly wise about friendship, marriage, gossip, parenting, mortality, and the messy, often excruciating business of loving other people.” (Leslie Jamison)

Every month, Sara, Agatha, Daphne, Liz, Josie, and Carolina meet—as book clubs do—to discuss their latest read, and everything else too. It’s a comfortable routine and “Book Club” nicely papers over the parts of their histories best left uninspected.

But when Josie’s husband abruptly leaves her for Carolina, and their lives begin to intersect and come undone in ways they couldn’t have foreseen, the remaining Book Club members must try to make sense of the chaos that has transpired. For each of them, this rupture in the fabric of their community surfaces her own private dramas and dredges up old wounds.

Rotating among the perspectives of the various hosts, The Third Street Book Club is a sharply observed novel of all the parts of middle life, as well as the power of collective and individual experiences reading fiction wrapped in a page-turning mystery.