A Dangerous Age — Ellen Gilchrist

The women in the Hand family are no strangers to controversy or sadness. Those traits seem, in fact, to be a part of their family's Southern heritage, one that stretches back through several generations. For Louise Hand, it means coping with the possible loss of the young man she has improbably fallen in love with, especially now that he has vowed revenge for the injuries suffered by his twin brother in Iraq.

Winifred Hand's loss came before the war began, when her fiancé flew to New York for an early morning meeting at the World Trade enter on 9/11. Now just as she is starting to experience life again, the war once more threatens to take away what happiness she has found.

And for Olivia Hand, the strong-willed independent editor of Tulsa, Oklahoma's preeminent newspaper, the war is a subject for editorials, a far-off conflict that she can write about with both passion and detachment -- until her newly wedded husband gets called up for service.

All three are reconnecting the pieces of their lives and rediscovering love. But each is unwittingly on a collision course with a seemingly distant war that is really never more than a breath away.

By turns humorous and heartbreaking, A Dangerous Age is a celebration of the strength of these women and of the bonds of blood and shared loss that hold them together. Haunting and elegantly crafted, it is a wonderfully human story about the centuries-old struggle of women who are left to carry on with life when their men go off to war.