The Dirty Birds' Book Club

Five husbands. Eight women. One book club where nobody gets to keep her secrets.

Mrs. Edna Stone has spent sixty years building a spotless reputation as the society matriarch of Searcy, Arkansas. She is also in her eighties, alone in a perfectly decorated living room, and bored out of her mind. She can lie down and die, or she can find a way to start living again. So she calls her best friend of fifty years and announces that they are starting a book club.

The invitations are handwritten. The rules are Edna's. What she doesn't plan for is the nightcap after the first meeting, when the youngest woman in the room asks an innocent question and Edna decides to answer it honestly: "I suppose it's because I've had five husbands. Three of them died rather terrible deaths."

Nobody wants to go home after that.

Eight women, ages twenty to eighty, gather around Edna's table. There is Millie, who bakes the Lemon Ice Box Pie and says what Edna won't. Taylor, the niece who came under protest. Bliss, who works three jobs, is raising a little boy, and reads everything. Ella, twenty years old and the last true romantic in the room. Tillie and Jenni, who know more than they let on. And Joules Parker, a forty-six-year-old political strategist who has done nearly everything in her life alone.

They name themselves the Dirty Birds, after an insult hurled at the heroine of the first novel they read, and they make one rule. Edna will tell them about her husbands, one at a time, but not until somebody else takes a turn in the hot seat first.

So the stories begin. Edna's starts in a Tennessee diner in 1964, where a girl in a hot pink waitress uniform is looking for a way out of town, and moves through New York, a Las Vegas wedding chapel, and the skies above America as one of the faces of TWA. Some of her marriages were funny. Some were romantic. One took her to the gates of hell.

While Edna looks back, Joules is forced to look ahead. Twelve years ago she froze her eggs and promised herself "later." Now she is home in Arkansas, working down the hall from the infuriating man who once pretended he had never met her, and carrying a first love she has never told her best friend about. In the hot seat, Joules begins to tell the truth, and what she does with it will change the rest of her life.

As the seasons turn, every woman takes her turn. Marriages, betrayals, losses, and long-buried family secrets come out over dinner, and each confession pulls them closer, until a guest list has become a family.

The Dirty Birds' Book Club is a warm, funny, deeply felt novel about friendship across generations, the double standards women still live with, and second chances that arrive later than anyone planned. It will make you laugh out loud, reach for the tissues, and call the friend you have been meaning to call.

Perfect for readers who love:

• Multigenerational women's fiction and found family
• Small-town Southern settings full of charm and secrets
• Dual timelines that move from the 1960s to today
• Second-chance romance and heroines over forty
• Book club fiction with plenty to argue about over dessert

For fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Robyn Carr, Brenda Novak, and Susan Mallery.

Book 3 in the Carrington Series, written as a complete standalone with a satisfying ending and no cliffhanger. New readers can start right here.

• Pull up a chair. Mrs. Edna has been saving you a seat.