Meet the women of American Housewife: they wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy. They casserole. They pinwheel. They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy. And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven. These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation...

Having relocated to an alienating Connecticut suburb after a mugging in her native New York City, wife and mother Kate Klein undertakes a murder investigation during her children's school hours when a local mom is killed.

“A lively story as delectable as a five-pound box of chocolates . . . a thoroughly engaging chronicle of friendship and the substantive place it holds in women’s lives.”—Anne D. LeClaire,  author of Leaving Eden

The women of Freesia Court are convinced that there is nothing good coffee, delicious desserts, and a strong shoulder can’t fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together—the...

Combining the incisive intimacy of Sally Rooney with the sharp wit of Helen Fielding, a compulsively readable and astonishingly relatable debut novel about marriage, motherhood, love, self and the vibrant, surprising city that is modern Tokyo. Mizuki is a Japanese housewife. She has a hardworking husband, two adorable children and a beautiful Tokyo apartment. It's everything a woman could want, yet sometimes she wonders whether it would be more fun...

Three people--a suburban housewife, a talented documentary photographer, and a detective--living lives they never wanted, hiding secrets that even those closest to them would never suspect, will find that the past doesn't recede ... and that desperation and hunger can lurk behind even the prettiest facades.

On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, a young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless but secure marriage or to follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying. Decades earlier in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien...

An anthology of Erma Bombeck's best writing, and a tribute to one of America's sharpest wits When she began writing her regular newspaper column in 1965, Erma Bombeck's goal was to make housewives laugh. Thirty years later, she had published more than four thousand columns, and earned countless laughsfrom housewives, presidents, and everyone in between. With grace, good humor, and razor-sharp prose, she gently skewered every aspect of the American...

Erma Bombeck takes on the unforgiving frontier of American suburbia For years, the Bombecks have heard rumors of a magical land called Suburbia where the air is clean, the grass is trimmed, and children don't risk getting mugged on their walk to school. After watching their friends flee the city for subdivided utopias like Bonaparte's Retreat and Mortgage Mañana, Erma and her family load up their belongings and cry, "Station wagons . . . ho!" But...

What if a successful, single Londoner and a comfortable, Connecticut mother of two were to walk in each other's shoes for a month? Vicky Townsley, director of Poise! magazine, lives a glamorous London life and has everything she wants; except marriage, children, and a house in the country. Amber Winslow has a mansion in Connecticut, two kids, and a nanny; but she hasn't found the fulfillment she expected from being a wife and mother. When she spots...

Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician...