Amanda Bright@home
by Danielle Crittenden
With a college degree from an elite university, a top-level job at the N.E.A., a loving and successful husband, and two adorable children, Amanda Bright is ready to conquer the world. But when she decides to leave her career to be a stay-at-home mom, Amanda finds that her college degree, her professional wardrobe, and glamorous friends and connections are no preparation for her new life. While everyone else around her is on the fast track, it's getting harder for Amanda to even remember -- or appreciate -- why she left work in the first place.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons
by Lorna Landvik
Sometimes life is like a bad waiter -- it serves you exactly what you don’t want. The women of Freesia Court have come together at life’s table, fully convinced that there is nothing good coffee, delectable desserts, and a strong shoulder can’t fix. Laughter is the glue that holds them together -- the foundation of a book group they call AWEB -- Angry Wives Eating Bon Bons -- an unofficial “club” that becomes much more. It becomes a lifeline.

Babes in Captivity
by Pamela Redmond Satran
They've satisfied their biological clocks. So what's that ticking sound? Deirdre, Juliette, Anne, and Lisa are each living The Dream in the suburbs outside of New York City: beautiful wedding, big house, picture perfect family. What more could a woman want? Plenty, though none of them has ever admitted it. Out loud, anyway. It all starts with Deirdre; when she learns that her ex-lover, musician Nick Ruby, has moved back East, she confides in her girlfriends that she regrets her lost singing career, and her lost love affair with Nick. And since there doesn't seem to be a "what's next" in her life, she's more than a little curious about "what if...?"

Being Mrs. Alcott
by Nancy Geary
Near a white-sand beach on Cape Cod stands the beautiful home that Grace and Bainbridge Alcott have owned for decades -- a time during which Grace has deferred her own opinions and dreams to try to be the perfect mother and the perfect “Mrs. Alcott.” But with her husband's premature retirement and their fortune dwindling, Bain's solitary decision to put the house up for sale threatens to destroy the fabric of Grace's life. Now, as she silently battles a terrible illness, Grace must find the courage to confront her husband and family, come to terms with the choices she has made, and salvage what she holds dear.

Goodnight Nobody
by Jennifer Weiner
For Kate Klein, a semi-accidental mother of three, suburbia's been full of unpleasant surprises. Her once-loving husband is hardly ever home. The supermommies on the playground routinely snub her. Her days are spent carpooling and enduring endless games of Candy Land, and at night, most of her orgasms are of the do-it-yourself variety. When a fellow mother is murdered, Kate finds that the unsolved mystery is one of the most interesting things to happen in Upchurch since her neighbors broke ground for a guesthouse and cracked their septic tank. Kate launches an unofficial investigation...

Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
“For the modern reader, familiar with adultery through magazine articles, television soap operas or personal experience, this classic novel shows how surprisingly common, how standardized, is the blueprint for such illicit affairs: The soft-focused imaginings, the touch of a hand, a suggestive phrase or smile, the search for seclusion, the breathless rush to the lover's arms, the fear of exposure, the financial outlay (and the need to hide it), the ever-growing recklessness, and then, more and more often, the violent arguments and impossible demands, the violation of promises, mutual recrimination and, finally, inevitably, the tearful break-up, leading to further heartache or embitterment and, sometimes, relief. As Flaubert writes about the last days of the affair with Leon, ‘They knew one another too well to experience that wonderment of mutual possession that increases its joy a hundredfold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma was discovering, in adultery, all the banality of marriage.’" -- Washington Post Book World

Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Published in 1925 and showing the influence of Freud and Joyce, this perceptive, richly textured novel follows the title's society matron through one seemingly insignificant June day. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway’s preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more. For it is the feeling behind these daily events that gives “Mrs. Dalloway” its texture and richness and makes it so memorable.

Queen Bee of Mimosa Branch
by Haywood Smith
"The only degree I have is a Ph.D. in Southern Bitch," proclaims Linwood Breedlove Scott, the feisty Prozac-popping, menopausal heroine of Smith's hardcover debut. When her husband drains their bank account and leaves her for a stripper, Lin retreats to her hometown of Mimosa Branch, Ga., to lick her wounds. Facing her conservative, gossipy Southern town as a newly divorced woman is no easy task, however, especially when her best friend lives miles away, her house has become a menagerie haunted by her Alzheimer's-stricken Uncle Bedford, and her boss at the drugstore is an uptight Northerner, Grant Owens, whom she finds disturbingly attractive. Determined to leave her meek hausfrau self behind and start taking charge of her life, she plots to seduce Grant and joins forces with an ex-con preacher with the proverbial heart of gold to oust the corrupt mayor from office.

Single Wife
by Nina Solomon
Grace Brookman's husband is missing. He wasn't kidnapped or murdered (she's fairly certain); he just seems to have run away from home. He got up one morning, and with an offhand “Gracie, I'll be back in a little while,” he was gone. Laz had left before, but this time, when several weeks pass and he doesn't return, Grace copes with the situation by pretending to family and friends that he's still around. At first, Grace covers for Laz in little ways: rumpling the sheets on his side of the bed every morning for the housekeeper, turning up his favorite music so the neighbors will hear it, leaving the doorman a daily cup of coffee, just as Laz always did. Soon Grace's life is completely consumed with re-creating his life. Over time the deception takes on a life of its own as her charade becomes more elaborate and she begins lying to friends and family, even her overbearing, ever-present Upper East Side parents. Grace finds herself steeped in denial about the truth of her husband's disappearance -- and the truth about him, as clues arise to suggest that he isn't the man she thought he was.

The Dirty Girls Social Club
by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
A vibrant, can’t-put-it-down novel of six friends—each one an unforgettable Latina woman in her late ‘20s—and the complications and triumphs in their lives. Inseparable since their days at Boston University almost ten years before, six friends form the Dirty Girls Social Club, a mutual support and (mostly) admiration society that no matter what happens to each of them (and a lot does), meets regularly to dish, dine and compare notes on the bumpy course of life and love.

The Future Homemakers of America
by Laurie Graham
Stationed at a U.S. Air Force base in Norfolk, England in 1952, a group of "Yankee wives" is thrown together by nothing more than husbands who patrol the skies keeping the Soviets at bay. They seem to have little in common; some, like piecrust queen Betty Gillis, are content to clip coupons and bake chocolate brownies, while others, like good-time girl Lois Moon, look for a little excitement beyond the perimeter fence. But the women soon discover similarities, from a common fear for their husbands to a desire to help out the war-ravaged British natives. Through marriage and divorce, separations and reunions, the gang will try to hold fast to each other in a story that takes us to the heart of female friendship -- and reveals the secret of the perfect Three Color Refrigerator Cake.

The Interruption of Everything
by Terry McMillan
Marilyn Grimes, wife and mother of three, has made a career of deferring her dreams to build a suburban California home and lifestyle with her workaholic husband, Leon. She also troubleshoots for her grown kids, cares for her live-in mother-in-law (and elderly poodle, Snuffy), keeps tabs on her girlfriends Paulette and Bunny and her own aging mother and foster sister— and holds down a part- time job. But at forty-four, Marilyn’s got too much on her plate and nothing to feed her passion. She feels like she’s about ready to jump. She’s just not sure where.

The Pull of the Moon
by Elizabeth Berg
Uncomfortable with the fit of her life, now that she's in the middle of it, Nan gets into her car and just goes -- driving across the country on back roads, following the moon, and stopping to talk to people. Through conversations with women, men, with her husband through letters, and with herself through her diary, Nan confronts topics long overdue for her attention. She writes to her husband and says things she's never admitted before; and she discovers how the fabric of her life can be reshaped into a more authentic creation.

The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives
by Sarah Strohmeyer
Pampered Hunting Hills, Ohio, socialite Marti Denton never realized she was madly in love with John Harding until he impulsively married Claire Stark, a beautiful but socially awkward newspaper reporter. It’s not until the Hunting Hills wives are plunged into a series of explosive scandals that the two women reach a new understanding of each other and what it means to be a fortunate wife in the twenty-first century.

The Stepford Wives
by Ira Levin
For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret -- a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same. At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.

The Sunday Wife
by Cassandra King
Married for 20 years to the Reverend Benjamin Lynch, a handsome, ambitious minister of the prestigious Methodist church, Dean Lynch has never quite adjusted her temperament to the demands of the role of a Sunday wife. When her husband is assigned to a larger and more demanding community in the Florida panhandle, Dean becomes fast friends with Augusta Holderfield, a woman whose good looks and extravagant habits immediately entrance her. As their friendship evolves, Augusta challenges Dean to break free from her traditional role as the preacher's wife. Just as Dean is questioning everything she has always valued, a tragedy occurs, providing the catalyst for change in ways she never could have imagined.

Wifey
by Judy Blume
Sandy Pressman is a nice suburban wife whose boredom is getting the best of her. She could be making friends at the club, like her husband keeps encouraging her to do. Or working on her golf game. Or getting her hair done. But for some reason, these things don't interest her as much as the naked man on the motorcycle...