Life estates

by Shelby Hearon

In her most searching and most accomplished novel to date, the author of Owning Jolene and Hug Dancing explores friendship and loss - and what binds two women together and what separates them. Sarah and Harriet, now in their mid-fifties, have been friends since boarding school. Their lives - Sarah in the Blue Ridge mountains of South Carolina and Harriet in the piney woods of East Texas - have run parallel courses: marriage, babies, even opting for separate bedrooms from their husbands at about the same time. Or are their paths really so similar? Now they find themselves, within the same year, widowed - and deep-rooted differences surface. For Sarah, marriage was a destructive snare; she finds freedom in nature, reward in a wallpaper business she has created (so women can make rooms of their own), and sexual satisfaction with a man in his late sixties who understands her needs. Harriet is lost, no longer employed as a wife; to protect herself she gets a gun; to bolster herself, a young