Time of Grace — Clare Harkness

In this moving portrait of two women who struggle to find fulfillment in the face of continuous and often hilarious adversity, Harkness explores the conflicts and difficulties of women throughout the world.
It was inevitable that Imogen and Jessica should become friends. Both of them precocious and agnostic, both arriving from unconventional homes abroad, coming to attend the same restrictive convent school, they were naturally singled out as different and were forced together in an alliance of outcasts.
Years later, the two women sit in the attic of a family home on Lake Maggiore, surrounded by trunks and boxes from which they dig out clothes, photographs, and letters. As they sift through the relics of eccentric school holidays, life at the Sorbonne, years spent apart in Cambridge and Milan, London and Washington, D.C., with husbands, lovers, and children, they are at times doubled up with laughter, at others, close to tears.