Mothers and Other Strangers

For readers of Claire Lombardo and J. Courtney Sullivan, a moving and surprising story about two women, best friends since childhood, who reunite as expectant mothers after a mysterious falling out between their mothers (also best friends) keeps them apart for years—and who must finally contend with the secrets between them. When Sydney and Mae meet on the playground as toddlers, it seems like kismet. Even their very different mothers**—the type-A Beth Ann and the free-spirited Joni—**agree the girls are made for each other, and it's not long before even the mothers become inseparable. Then a falling out draws them apart, and decades later, the loneliness still lingers for the newly pregnant Sydney. Adrift in the absence of her closest friend, Sydney has been drawn into a Multi-Level Marketing scheme, exacerbated by the demands of her inflexible mother, Beth Ann, whose constant scrutiny seems reserved only for her daughter. Across the city, Mae is stunned to find herself single, pregnant, and still haunted by the loss of her mercurial late mother, Joni, whose mysterious death holds as many unanswered questions as Mae does herself. Mae is an artist who has lived under the shadow of the one painting (of two girls) that made her famous years ago, the success of which confines as much as it defines her. When Sydney and Mae find themselves back in one another’s lives, each with a baby girl on the horizon, it once again seems like destiny. Each begins to pull the other away from the coercive influence of outsiders—mommy groups, marketing schemes, artistic pressures, and ex-boyfriends. But the two women will soon discover that it’s not destiny that has drawn them together this time, but a devastating secret at the center of their orbits—a truth that finally will bind them or shatter them, for good. An intimate and searing novel about mothers and daughters, and destiny and desire, MOTHERS AND OTHER STRANGERS takes a full-hearted look at those relationships in life that are as impossible as they are utterly essential.