Laurel Lathrop

A rich, warmly populated debut novel exploring the complexities of intimacy between women friends – a drama that feels both intensely personal and universal. Set in a vividly realized suburban America of an earlier era, it dramatizes the life of a woman of her time – wife, mother, lover – in beautifully engaging prose

The Plum Queen is a richly-hued and luxuriant time machine that immerses the reader in women’s lives of the century just past, in women’s secrets, and particularly in women’s secret love affairs with each other. In remarkably assured prose, Lathrop paints a portrait of an erotically-charged female friendship that never ceases to surprise us.

'A richly hued and luxuriant time machine that immerses the reader in women’s lives of the century just past, in women’s secrets, and particularly in women’s secret love affairs with each other.' Susan Choi, author of Flashlight 
 
Before she became Howard’s wife and mother to their girls, there were the plum orchards. There was Phoebe. 
 
When the letter arrives in the days after her husband’s death, Lenore instantly knows who it is from: Phoebe – her best friend, her first love, the girl who once seemed to hold the upper hand in everything – who she hasn’t seen in almost forty years. Is it an olive branch, or will it reopen old wounds that have taken half a lifetime to heal? 
 
As Lenore wrestles with whether to allow Phoebe back into her life, she reflects on the three great loves who shaped it. Each relationship had its own unique pleasures, risks and sacrifices, and in each Lenore made life-changing choices. What will she choose now? 
 
The Plum Queen is a sensuous, richly textured novel of love and loss, that confronts the many versions of ourselves that accumulate over a lifetime: the person we could have been, the person we once were, and the person we still might become.

The Plum Queen

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