Life Estates

Sarah and Harriet have led parallel lives ever since they went to boarding school together. Now, in their mid-fifties, they are widowed within three months of each other. For Sarah, who has her own business and soon finds an attentive older lover, widowhood is a release from the sterile snare of marriage. But beautiful, flirtatious Harriet feels like nothing more than an unemployed wife, a woman alone in a dangerous world, a woman no man will ever love again. As Sarah and Harriet gradually, painfully, come to terms with each other and with the men they buried, Shelby Hearon gives us a novel that is at once compassionate and wry, sorrowful and deeply warm.