Superior Women

Eager to escape her carhop mother and the rank and file of her California town,Megan Greene heads for Radcliffe — in part to pursue an older man (twenty-one, Harvard medical school, Cape Cod summers) who represents her dream of the upper-middle-class, conservative East Coast. What Megan finds are four other girls — Janet, Lavinia, Peg, and Cathy — who seem to have little in common save for their freshman status. Neither they nor Megan could know that their destinies are about to inextricably intertwine.

The year is 1943, and these superior women, as often enemies as friends, willshare a place in each other's lives that no one else can — not husbands, notlovers. Across four decades, as time and events sweep away their expectations,five women discover their sexuality, reveal their secrets, struggle withindependence — sometimes surrendering, sometimes making stunning choices — in Alice Adams' richly drawn, uncompromising novel about women's intimate,interior, and often unsuspected lives.

San Francisco Chronicle

A remarkable compression of time, memory, and sentiment — rather as if Hemingway had been turned loose on Proust . . .

Alice Adams, born in Virginia and educated at Radcliffe College, is the author of ten highly praised novels. Her short stories have appeared in twenty-two O. Henry Award scollections and several volumes of Best American Short Stories. She has been the recipient of an Academy and Institute Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ms. Adams' other novels include Almost Perfect, a New York Times Notable Book, and Medicine Men, both published by Washington Square Press. She lives in San Francisco.