The Graduates

Summary

From the bestselling author of The Light After the War comes a beautiful story of resilience and female friendship that will resonate with readers of Beatriz Williams and Bonnie Garmus.

Commencement day at Wellesley College, a prominent female psychologist takes the stage and advises the graduates to do more than listen to their “biological clocks”; they should also listen to their “interior clocks,” which will guide them through the trials and tribulations of their future. The speech kicks off the trajectory of three best friends from vastly different backgrounds as they embark on their postgrad lives in a world that is unfair and often unkind to women.

Caroline Addams could not be more ready to begin her new life, but she cautiously enters the real world with a secret she’s kept from everyone she holds dear. Rachel Weber, daughter of Jewish immigrants who escaped Germany just before the war, sidesteps her parents’ wishes for her to pursue medical school and enters the burgeoning field of computers—and falls in love with a non-Jewish programmer. Betty O’Neal, a Southern belle expected to return home and enter her parents’ social circle, struggles to distance herself from a lifetime of bearing witness to her father’s womanizing and her mother’s subsequent drinking.

The Graduates checks in on our three compelling protagonists at the pinnacle of each decade following their college graduation—through the Swinging Sixties, the liberating seventies, and the power-hungry eighties. As each woman fights her own battles, it is ultimately the power of their friendship that keeps them going.