Grand Avenue » (Reprint)

Joy Fielding is the award-winning author of more than a dozen novels, including The First Time, Don't Cry Now, See Jane Run, and Kiss Mommy Goodbye. She lives with her family in Toronto and Palm Beach.

Looking back, it seemed like paradise: lives filled with the blessings of friendship, marriage, children, and career. For twenty years, four friends—Chris, Barbara, Susan, and Vicki—shared everything through good times and bad, and faced the challenges of life and love head-on.

Now, one sits alone to ponder the strange twists and turns of fate and circumstance.

Now, she must sift thorugh each of their pasts to discover exactly what went wrong, how dreams turned to nightmares as friendships faded and lives were destroyed.

Chris lived a contented life in her modest house with her growing family. It was her husband who never seemed satisfied—and who expected her to sacrifice her happiness to cater to his whims.

Barbara prided herself on staying beautiful for her handsome professor husband. But it wasn't enough to keep him from dallying with his nubile young students.

Susan finished college after motherhood and became a successful magazine editor. But a casual flirtation threatened to shatter the harmonious life she had worked so hard to build.

Vicki's achievements as a stellar and sought-after trial lawyer came at a huge personal price: a marriage and family that always took second place.

Going deep inside the minds and hearts of her utterly believable characters, Joy Fielding unlocks the secrets hidden within even the closest relationships. This powerful and mesmerizing novel explores the bonds women forge, the nature of friendship, and the meaning of unconditional love.

Publishers Weekly

Bestselling author Fielding (The First Time) takes a trip down memory lane in this romantic drama with a thriller twist at the end. Four women friends meet as young mothers living on Grand Avenue in an upscale Cincinnati suburb and, over the course of 23 years, collectively go through a whole range of human experience. In creating Chris, who's trapped in an abusive marriage, Fielding effectively captures the private terror of a woman psychologically and physically damaged by her husband. Vicki, the hotshot lawyer who cheats on her husband, is a workaholic mom whose family takes second place to corporate success. Susan embodies the modern mother who tries to do right by her family, but faces the challenge of a recalcitrant adolescent daughter and, later, sexual harassment on the job. Former beauty queen Barbara is a looks-obsessed woman whose devotion to countless plastic surgeries blinds her to the qualities that make a relationship work. With her usual page-turning flair, Fielding churns out a swiftly paced story that acquires real suspense when one of the characters meets a surprising fate and the meaning of friendship is put to the ultimate test. The tense denouement resolves into a tear-inducing finale, manna to Fielding's fans. 11-city author tour; teaser chapter to run in the mass market edition of The First Time. (Oct.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.