Marisa de los Santos

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What if saying hello to an old friend meant saying good-bye to life as you know it?

It’s been six years since Pen Calloway watched her best friends walk out of her life. And through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them.

Pen, Cat, and Will met on their first day of college and formed what seemed like a magical and lifelong bond, only to see their friendship break apart amid the realities of adulthood. When, after years of silence, Cat - the bewitching, charismatic center of their group - e-mails Pen and Will with an urgent request to meet at their college reunion, they can’t refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will, with Pen’s five-year-old daughter and Cat’s hostile husband in tow, on a journey across the world.

With her trademark wit, vivid prose, and gift for creating authentic, captivating characters, Marisa de los Santos returns with an emotionally resonant novel about our deepest human connections. As Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now. They must confront the reasons their friendship fell apart and discover how - and if - it can ever fall back together. (from audible.com)

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I discovered this book the other day at my local indie awesome bookstore. I had no idea that de los Santos--whose first two books, Love Walked In and Belong to Me, were ones I adored--had a new one out. Fortunately, I had a credit on audible.com and came right home and downloaded this new one. I'm less than halfway through it at the moment, but it has the qualities I loved from her previous two works: The writing is gorgeous, and the characters are flawed and incredibly, undeniably human. If you want to check out her work and start with the first two, you'll need to read Love Walked In first, as Belong to Me is a continuation of its story. This new one is unrelated and can be read without those two, if you like to start with the most recent of a writer's repertoire.