A Wedding in December brings together a group of prep school friends more than 20 years later at an inn in western Massachusetts. The inn is owned by Nora, who married a famous poet and is now widowed, and she's hosting the marriage of Bill and Bridget. They were high school sweethearts who married other people before discovering each other again. Bridget, though, has breast cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. The other friends include Harrison, who is still haunted by the drowning death of a friend back in their senior year, and Agnes who is now a teacher at the prep school. Agnes is writing a novel based around the explosion during World War I that devastated Halifax, Nova Scotia, and her novel within the novel parallels the lives of her friends and may expose the secret Agnes still carries with her. Anita Shreve's novel has received mixed reviews with the Washington Post saying, "I really liked this book. It's beautifully and imaginatively written. But I also have to admit that A Wedding in December works at one level as exceedingly high-class domestic porn -- a paean to how we all wish we could live if we had the time, money, discipline and dedication."
When Harriet Mahoney first sees it, Isabel Krug’s bed is covered in sheared sheep and littered with celebrity biographies. The unpublished, fortyish, and recently jilted Harriet has fled Manhattan for a room atop a Cape Cod dune. There, in Isabel’s loudly elegant retreat, she’ll ghostwrite The Isabel Krug Story, based on the sexy blonde’s scandalous tabloid past. Unusually talend in the man department (“I give lessons”), Isabel revamps and inspires Harriet as they gear up to tell all, including the tangled story Isabel shares with her odd lodger, Costas. Life according to Isabel is a soap-opera extravanganza, an experience to be swallowed whole – and the attitude is catching…
