Season of Shadows

Two women struggle with love and loss in the turbulent 1960s in this novel of their enduring lifelong friendship from a New York Times–bestselling author.

An English major at Radcliffe, Lucy Constable tolerates the sexism from both her male peers and the university policies at Harvard, believing that her future only consists of being a wife and mother. Then she meets David Blake, a radical poet who introduces her to a bohemian lifestyle and revolutionary ideals in a whirlwind romance before breaking her heart. Turning her focus to social causes, her love life is reignited when she meets Prince Mila of the Himalayan Kingdom of Patan. Inspired by his commitment to modernizing his country to alleviate poverty and inequality, Lucy falls for Mila’s charms, marries him, and becomes his Princess—only to encounter in Patan a misogynist political culture so resistant to reform that she flees back to the US under a false name so the Patan secret police, who are pursuing her, can’t find her.

Cassandra “Cassie” Quinn, Lucy’s roommate at Radcliffe, studies botany, striving for achievement to impress her distant father, a Nobel Prize–winning scientist. Unable to win his love or forge any emotional connection to him, Cassie rebels at every opportunity, hoping to shock him out of his complacency with one unsuitable lover after another. Andy Rabinowitz is her latest conquest, except he’s looking for more than a casual fling. Their shared scientific ambition brings them together in marriage, until the stresses of their graduate work—and the harsh judgment of Cassie’s father—tears them apart, causing her life to spiral out of control. Accidentally implicated in a counterculture terrorist plot, she is also forced to go into hiding, and change her name.

Best friends since high school and sisters in spirit, Lucy and Cassie have always supported one another, even when they lived thousands of miles apart. Reunited in the wake of their personal tragedies, the women help each other prosper in their new identities for years, until the bonds of their friendship are tested and they are faced with the question: “How much are you willing to sacrifice to save your best friend?”