Alice Sadie Celine

Obsessed! Chlo Sevigny I am literally obsessed. Busy Philipps Hailed as richly intimate and wickedly delightful (The New York Times Book Review), this steamy and incisive debut adult novel follows one womans affair with her daughters best friend, testing the limits of love and ambition. Its opening night, but Alices performance in the local Bay Area production of The Winters Tale is far from glamorous. She doesnt have dreams of stardom, but the basement theater in a wildfire-choked town isnt exactly what she envisioned for her career back home in Los Angeles. To make matters worse, her best friend Sadie is not even coming. Pragmatic, serious Sadie and flighty, creative Alice have been best friends since high schoolreally one anothers only friendsbut now that they are through with college (which they attended together) and living on opposite ends of California, Alice would at least expect her friends support. Sadie, determined not to cancel her plans with her boyfriend, ends up enlisting the help of her mother, Celine. A professor of womens and gender studies at UC Berkeley, Celines landmark treatise on sex and identity made her notorious, but shes struggling to write her new book in a post-second-wave feminist world. So, when Sadie begs her to attend Alices play, she relents, if only to escape writers block. But in a turn of perplexing events, Celine becomes entranced by Alices performance and realizes that her daughters once lanky, slightly annoying best friend is now an irresistible young woman. Set over the course of decadesfrom Alice and Sadies early friendship days and Celines decision to leave her husband to the radical movements of 1990s Berkeley and navigating contemporary HollywoodAlice and Celines affair will test the limits of their love for Sadie and their own beliefs of power, agency, and feminism. Witty and relatable, sexy and surprising, Sarah Blakley-Cartwrights debut adult novel is a mesmerizing portrait of the inner lives of three very different women.