"Hannah Martin's life isn't shaping up into much of anything. Since graduating college eight years ago, she has lived in six different cities and held countless meaningless jobs ... She takes up residence in her best friend Gabby's guest room. Along with Gabby and Gabby's husband Mark, [she goes] out to a bar where they meet up with some of [their] old friends, including Hannah's high school boyfriend, Ethan. Shortly after midnight, Gabby asks Hannah...

Young college graduate Carol Milford moves from the city to tiny Gopher Prairie after marrying the local doctor, and tries to bring culture to the small town. But her efforts to reform the prairie village are met by a wall of gossip, greed, conventionality, pitifully unambitious cultural endeavors, and—worst of all—the pettiness and bigotry of small-town minds.

On a beautiful June day in 1965, a dozen girls-classmates at a picturesque Blue Ridge women's college-launched their homemade raft (inspired by Huck Finn's) on a trip down the Mississippi. It's Girls A-Go-Go Down the Mississippi read the headline in the Paducah, Kentucky, paper. Thirty-five years later, four of those "girls" reunite to cruise the river again. This time it's on the luxury steamboat, The Belle of Natchez, and there's no publicity....

Mel, Sara, Annie, and Lola have traveled distinct and diverse paths since their years together at a small Southern liberal arts college during the early 1980s. Now the friends, all in their forties, converge on Lola's lavish North Carolina beach house in an attempt to relive the carefree days of their college years. But as the week wears on and each woman's hidden story is gradually revealed, these four friends learn that they must inevitably confront...

Charlotte Silver dazzles with a ruefully funny coming-of-age novel that follows two recent Bennington grads who are determined to make it in the Big Apple. "Bennington College, founded in 1932 as a suitable refuge for the wayward daughters of good families, maintains its saucy reputation for attracting free spirits. There, acres outnumber students, the faculty is composed of fading hippie and clothing is largely optional. Or, as J. D. Salinger put...

Sparking enthusiasm for a play about the founding of their North Carolina mountains Catholic girls' school, a charismatic ninth grader and her recently orphaned best friend set in motion a series of events that have decades-long ramifications.

The gift of Christmas: "This year Ashley has finished her education, launched her career and affirmed her faith. And she's now in a position to pay Cooper back the money he lent her for college. She's achieved all her goals-- except one, and it has to do with Cooper, the man she fell in love with years ago. The man whose love she craves. Cooper gave her the gift of her education and Ashley would like to return the favor-- and offer him her love. But...

This debut novel tells the story of a WASPy, old-Boston family coming face to face with an America much larger than the one it was born in. Caroline Dunlap has written off the insular world of the Boston deb parties, golf club luaus, and WASP weddings that she grew up with. But when she reluctantly returns home after her college graduation, she finds that not everything is quite as predictable, or protected, as she had imagined. Her father, the eccentric,...

"When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper; gift wrapper; laziest ever part-time clerk at the Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. ... Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its core values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. Accompanied by her mother, her sister,...

Recent graduate, Dawn West lands a job tracking down past winners of Charm Magazines's "Ten Girls to Watch" contest. Includes readers' guide.