Last Girls

On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls launched their homemade raft on a trip down the Mississippi. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite on the river. This time it's on a luxury steamboat, and when they reach New Orleans, they'll give the river the ashes of a fifth rafter. Lee Smith tells a brilliantly perceptive story of how college pals who grew up in an era when they were still called "girls" have negotiated life as women. Harriet is a hesitant teacher who has never married, while Courtney struggles to escape her Southern Living lifestyle. Catherine is suffocating in her happy third marriage, and Anna is a romance novelist escaping her own tragedies through her fiction. Finally, there is Baby, the girl they come to bury -- along with their memories of her rebellions and betrayals. The Last Girls is wonderfully revealing of women's lives -- of the idea of romance, of the relevance of past to present, of memory and desire. Lee Smith is, as the New York Times put it, "nothing less than masterly." Lee Smith's previous novels include Fair and Tender Ladies and The Christmas Letters. Her writing won the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award and the 1999 Academy Award for fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She grew up in Virginia and now lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.