Significant Others

Two women test how much weight their friendship can hold in this poignant and tender novel.

Roommates since college, Jess and Ren have built a strong—if at times codependent—friendship. Now navigating their late thirties, the women co-own a weathered beachfront home, comother a rescued shelter pup and have inadvertently centered their lives around each other.

Jess is clever and driven with a lucrative career running her own real estate brokerage. Magnetic but aimless, Ren has been making margaritas at the same local dive and teaching dance classes at the same run-down gym for well over a decade. After a one-night stand with a tourist leads to pregnancy, Ren realizes motherhood may be the change she’s been waiting for, and the friends make a plan to raise the child together.

Ren is excitedly pushing toward her due date when the baby’s father resurfaces, forcing Jess to face the foreboding notion that for the first time in eighteen years, they may not want the same thing.

In this stunning debut spanning nine pivotal months in the lives of two very different women, Zoë Eisenberg examines female friendship with emotional precision and offers an intimate look at who we belong to—and why.