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Five Women

Author Rona Jaffe
Ebook
Berkley / NAL | InterMix
On sale Feb 18, 2014 | 590 Pages | 9780698150911
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Five stories from five unforgettable characters, brought to life by an author the Washington Post hailed as “contemporary…rewarding…masterful.”
 
Five friends meet weekly at a restaurant called Yellowbird on New York’s Upper East Side, revealing the long-hidden secrets of their pasts and how each, in her fashion, has become a survivor beyond all expectations.
 
The women are Gara, a divorced psychologist and cancer survivor; Felicity, a beautiful attorney married to a rich but controlling man; Kathryn, who is haunted by the brutality of her parents’ marriage; Eve, an unabashedly narcissistic actress; and Billie, a former rock star, now owner of Yellowbird.
 
Told with Jaffe’s signature liveliness and uncanny understanding of female friendship, Five Women invites us to the table to hear stories both familiar and unthinkable, stories of struggle, heartbreak, survival and redemption.
 
PRAISE FOR RONA JAFFE
 
“Reading Rona Jaffe is like being presented with a Cartier watch: you know exactly what you’re getting and it’s exactly what you want.”—Cosmopolitan
 
“Vivid and trenchant…Wry and very readable…A minor genius.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“Jaffe has not lost her wit, her keen eye for human frailties and her ear for the small but telling remark.”—Publishers Weekly
Rona Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1931. She was the daughter of Samuel Jaffe, a high school principal, and Diana (née Ginsberg) Jaffe, the daughter of Moses Ginsberg, the construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel. Rona was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and was a lifelong New Yorker. She attended the Dalton School and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 at the age of 19. In her early twenties she worked at Fawcett Publications, starting as a file clerk and working her way up to associate editor. At twenty-five she quit her job to focus on a novel she had started about women in the publishing industry. In 1958 The Best of Everything was published by Simon & Schuster. The work, provocative and prescient, hit a nerve among readers, especially women, and became an overnight success and bestseller. The following year a film adaptation was released starring Joan Crawford, Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, and Diane Baker. Jaffe went on to write sixteen more books during her career including Class Reunion, Mr. Right Is Dead, The Other Woman, Family Secrets, The Road Taken, and The Room-Mating Season. In 1995, she established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, a program to identify and support promising emergent women writers, which provided over $3 million in grants during its 26-year history. Jaffe’s legacy continues through her Foundation and its funding of important areas of societal and cultural need. Rona Jaffe died of cancer in 2005. View titles by Rona Jaffe

About

Five stories from five unforgettable characters, brought to life by an author the Washington Post hailed as “contemporary…rewarding…masterful.”
 
Five friends meet weekly at a restaurant called Yellowbird on New York’s Upper East Side, revealing the long-hidden secrets of their pasts and how each, in her fashion, has become a survivor beyond all expectations.
 
The women are Gara, a divorced psychologist and cancer survivor; Felicity, a beautiful attorney married to a rich but controlling man; Kathryn, who is haunted by the brutality of her parents’ marriage; Eve, an unabashedly narcissistic actress; and Billie, a former rock star, now owner of Yellowbird.
 
Told with Jaffe’s signature liveliness and uncanny understanding of female friendship, Five Women invites us to the table to hear stories both familiar and unthinkable, stories of struggle, heartbreak, survival and redemption.
 
PRAISE FOR RONA JAFFE
 
“Reading Rona Jaffe is like being presented with a Cartier watch: you know exactly what you’re getting and it’s exactly what you want.”—Cosmopolitan
 
“Vivid and trenchant…Wry and very readable…A minor genius.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“Jaffe has not lost her wit, her keen eye for human frailties and her ear for the small but telling remark.”—Publishers Weekly

Author

Rona Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1931. She was the daughter of Samuel Jaffe, a high school principal, and Diana (née Ginsberg) Jaffe, the daughter of Moses Ginsberg, the construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel. Rona was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and was a lifelong New Yorker. She attended the Dalton School and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 at the age of 19. In her early twenties she worked at Fawcett Publications, starting as a file clerk and working her way up to associate editor. At twenty-five she quit her job to focus on a novel she had started about women in the publishing industry. In 1958 The Best of Everything was published by Simon & Schuster. The work, provocative and prescient, hit a nerve among readers, especially women, and became an overnight success and bestseller. The following year a film adaptation was released starring Joan Crawford, Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, and Diane Baker. Jaffe went on to write sixteen more books during her career including Class Reunion, Mr. Right Is Dead, The Other Woman, Family Secrets, The Road Taken, and The Room-Mating Season. In 1995, she established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, a program to identify and support promising emergent women writers, which provided over $3 million in grants during its 26-year history. Jaffe’s legacy continues through her Foundation and its funding of important areas of societal and cultural need. Rona Jaffe died of cancer in 2005. View titles by Rona Jaffe

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