Next to Love - Softcover

"Haunting and profoundly moving . . . At turns brave, frustrating, and fragile, [Ellen] Feldman's characters live and love with breathtaking intensity."--"Booklist" (starred review) "A remarkable novel driven by the powerful engine of most great literature: the yearning for a self."--Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" "An intimate look at how we can be dismantled and rebuilt by changing times."--"O: The Oprah Magazine"" " "A deftly revealing . . . portrait of the changing face of America . . . heartbreaking reality."--"Marie Claire"" " "An honest American experience of the aftermath of World War II rendered in sharp detail and full of pathos, "Next to Love" tells us what we hate to acknowledge--that personal battles don't end with the armistice."--Susan Vreeland, author of "Clara and Mr. Tiffany"

Babe, Grace and Millie have been best friends since their first day at their small town's only kindergarten. Despite their differences, they've played together, grown up together, shared each other's secrets. And when World War Two becomes a reality for America too, the girls begin a new phase of their lives together - each quickly marries her first true love. With the men away, life is difficult for these newly married women, but when no fewer than sixteen telegrams arrive on a single morning in 1944, bearing news of the worst kind from the War Department, the girls know that nothing will ever be the same again . . . As each woman struggles to rebuild a life, they face not only the challenges closest to home - the brutal effects of war, the question of remarriage, of how to tell a child about their absent father - but also the wider issues of a country in flux - sexism, racism, anti-Semitism. Tinged with tragedy, yet filled with hope, Next to Love is the story of three women at the heart of the century - a celebration of their friendship across decades of the most unthinkable adversity. It is a remarkable novel you are unlikely to forget.