Friends and Strangers

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From the best-selling author of Maine, a gorgeous, compulsively-readable novel that tells the story of the complex relationship between two women, Elisabeth, a privileged new mother and writer attempting to find her footing after childbirth, and Sam, the idealistic, working-class college student she hires to nanny her young son.When Elisabeth and Andrew decided to move their family to a college town Elisabeth envisioned a life attending lectures, eating Ethiopian food, surrounded by neighbors who all vote Democrat. In reality, it feels strange to live in a town that centers on a college when Elisabeth has nothing to do with it. Alone with her son all day, Elisabeth neglects her work and loses hours down the internet rabbit hole of her Brooklyn mom's Facebook group, clinging to threads from her old life and texting a best friend she never gets to see anymore. Enter Sam--a senior at the nearby women's college--who joins the family as the baby's caregiver. In some ways, Sam seems like a younger version of Elisabeth, smart and driven, already bored of the college parties with punch mixed in dorm room recycling bins. However, in other ways Sam is from a different world, the daughter of a contractor who works in the campus dining hall to supplement her financial aid. As Sam navigates a romantic entanglement that compromises her academic ambition, Elisabeth grapples with pressure from Andrew to get pregnant again, and Sam increasingly becomes Elisabeth's close confidante, a repository for secrets Elisabeth is too ashamed to tell even her own husband. But when the true differences between their lives becomes starkly revealed, the intimacy these two women share is threatened and a betrayal has devastating costs. Friends and Strangers explores the cost of secrets in a marriage, the nature of money between friends, the way privilege can come in different forms, and how a single year can shape a person and a life.