On the surface, the members of the facetiously named “Same Sweet Girls” club six women, now in their 40s, who’ve known one another since college and still get together twice a year seem like unlikely friends. In background, lifestyle, taste in men and even geography, they started out with little in common, and that hasn’t changed much over the years. Instead, they seem to draw strength mostly from the history they share they’re friends because they’ve always been friends, which may be as good a reason as any. The Same Sweet Girls, Cassandra King’s third novel, is told from the perspectives of Corrine, Julia and Lanier, who are the closest of the six friends (although it hasn’t always been that way). Among these, Julia is the most glamorous. “Classically beautifully in a Grace Kelly way,” she hails from a prominent Alabama family and grew up to marry the governor. She carries a dark secret, though, one that even some of the Same Sweet Girls (SSGs for short) don’t know about. Corrine, the most eccentric, is an acclaimed artist who suffers from twin demons of depression and an abusive ex-husband, Miles a psychologist, of all things. (How do you think they met?) Lanier is the reckless one, a nurse with a history of screw-ups in her personal life. Estranged from her husband and unexpectedly reacquainted with a childhood crush, Lanier is the most colorful of the SSGs. She also has the best lines. When Corrine falls ill, Lanier finds dark humor in the fact that Miles, sadistic as ever, is still lurking: “Julia had trouble sleeping . . . kept getting up all through the night,” Lanier reports, after she’d convinced Julia to leave Corrine’s bedside and get some rest. “I said, Why didn’t you give Miles a call? Bet he’d have been glad to come and tie you to the bedposts.” King, who is married to author Pat Conroy, is known for her emphatically Southern tales. The Same Sweet Girls is based loosely on the author’s own circle of friends, and as a warm tribute to their friendship indeed, to all friendships it succeeds nicely. Rosalind S. Fournier writes from Birmingham, Alabama.

Pull up your rocking chairs and gather around the porch. This Southern-fried tale of a family filled with beguiling women is as sweet as pecan pie. In The Rock Orchard, the Belle women of Leaper’s Fork, Tennessee, are known for their lust for life and for men. Charlotte Belle is a shrewd businesswoman who spends her days making money and her evenings in the company of a variety of local gentlemen. She has resisted any semblance of settling down, until the day her baby niece is dropped on her doorstep. Charlotte raises Angela as she would her own, so it’s no surprise when teenaged Angela gives birth to her own daughter, Dixie, in the flowerbed behind the house.

Just down the road, Dr. Adam Montgomery is busy setting up his practice and working his way up the local social ladder. He happens upon Angela just as she goes into labor, and helps deliver Dixie. From that day forward, Dr. Montgomery can’t get the beautiful Angela out of his mind, despite his planned marriage to a proper Bostonian who is “as pure as pasteurized milk.” Even though the Belle girls are, as author Paula Wall puts it, wild as barncats, they have a funny way of encouraging their fellow townsfolk to improve themselves and their community. Charlotte gives a local abused wife the determination to start her own business. Angela prods Dr. Montgomery to establish a local hospital. Then a new preacher comes to town; once he is introduced to the Belle women, Leaper’s Fork will never be the same.

The Rock Orchard is endlessly clever and addictively fast-paced. To say that Wall, the author of two humor collections (including If I Were a Man, I’d Marry Me), has a way with words is putting it mildly, and her storytelling is simultaneously sweet and sharp. The Belle women are not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but their story shows the power of community and demonstrates that grace can be found in the most unexpected places. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

I don’t know if there is a sound lonelier than the silence of everybody gone. This is the morose frame of mind in which we find Ave Maria MacChesney, heroine of the best-selling Big Stone Gap trilogy. With her young daughter (too young, in Ave Maria’s opinion) newly married and living in Italy, Ave Maria is restless. She doesn’t find her usual fulfillment in her work as Big Stone Gap’s pharmacist, and her ailing husband, Jack, is considering a job with a mining company that could spell environmental catastrophe for the tiny Virginia town. Worst of all, Ave and her best friend Iva Lou aren’t speaking, after a blowout argument over a secret from Iva Lou’s past. Adriana Trigiani has detoured from the comfortable confines of Big Stone Gap in recent years, using her apparently vast imagination on wildly varying subjects: a 1950s male interior decorator (Rococo), an ambitious New York seamstress (Lucia Lucia), turn-of-the-century Italian farmers (The Queen of the Big Time), even a cookbook (Cooking with My Sisters). She’s a consistently appealing storyteller, whatever the subject matter. Still, it must be said: It’s good to come home to Big Stone Gap. Trigiani’s light touch yields a realistic portrayal of small-town life sometimes bucolic, sometimes as constricting as a too-small shoe and a cast of charmingly imperfect characters: Pharmacy employee Fleeta Mullins tartly passes judgment on customers, an unlit cigarette dangling from her lips. The usually wise Iva Lou fumbles when she has to confront her checkered past. And Ave Maria and Jack just can’t seem to agree on Jack’s new career.

In an attempt to get back on track, they make a trip to Jack’s ancestral home in Scotland. But they soon learn that even the lush green hills of Aberdeen can’t compare to the comforts of Big Stone Gap and readers will certainly agree. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

<B>In McMurtry’s latest, two wild women hit the road</B> When Larry McMurtry is not writing a western, the West is usually lurking somewhere in the background. This is the case with his latest offering, a humorous saga of two post-menopausal free spirits who set off from L.A. to Texas for one last fling.

Maggie and Connie have been best friends since sixth grade and cruising for guys since they were 14. Maggie has three married daughters who no longer need her; after her hysterectomy she is totally at loose ends, and inexplicably depressed. She begins to lose interest in running her "loop group" a cast of motley characters who dub death groans and squeals for movie soundtracks. She tires of listening to her daughters’ endless marital woes, and her affair with her somewhat kinky and married shrink is going nowhere. So Maggie talks Connie into taking a trip to Texas to visit her eccentric Aunt Cooney, a chicken rancher who keeps two million chickens and lives in a house with 32 bedrooms. Mag-gie and Connie pack a snakebite kit, cowboy boots and plenty of black bras, and off they go stopping whenever they need a drink or a little pot, and getting lost only a few times. Unfortun-ately, Maggie’s cell phone gives her little respite from family responsibilities, and she is constantly kept abreast of what’s going on back in L.A., including one teenage niece getting pregnant and all three sons-in-law leaving her daughters for younger women.

Upon their return, things are still not going all that well: the shrink has "passed on," and Maggie and Connie have both lost their jobs. Maggie mulls over her options finding another shrink? Joining a convent? Or should she just try and pull together the loop group again? There are those maxed-out credit cards, after all.

McMurtry obviously had a lot of fun writing about what must be his firsthand experience with the downsides of menopause. This is more of a "chick book" than many of his previous novels, but his biting and insightful humor is still evident in this honest portrayal of L.A., Hollywood and two Valley Girls approaching their "advanced years." <I>Deborah Donovan writes from Cincinnati and La Veta, Colorado.</I>

Has Anna Quindlen achieved more success as a novelist or a columnist? It’s a toss-up. Quindlen earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her acclaimed <i>New York Times</i> opinion column, and her opinions currently appear in <i>Newsweek</i> magazine.

Yet Quindlen also is the author of four best-selling novels, including <i>One True Thing</i>, which was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger. Whether debating international policy on the pages of the <i>Times</i> or writing about the fictional lives of her many colorful characters, Quindlen has carved a niche with her uniquely lucid, soulful prose. In <b>Rise and Shine</b>, sisters Meghan and Bridget Fitzmaurice are best friends despite their very different lives. Bridget works at a Bronx shelter for women battling drugs, poverty and bad choices in men. Meghan is the Katie Couric-esque host of Rise and Shine, the nation’s top-rated morning program. The nation is scandalized when, during a live interview with a repulsive dot-com billionaire who’s left his wife for the surrogate carrying their babies, Meghan utters a few choice curse words sure to make the FCC cringe. Meghan the journalist suddenly becomes the story, and she retreats to Jamaica reeling from her very public fall from grace. Bridget is left to take care of Meghan’s teenage son while trying to contact her sister, who has thrown her BlackBerry into the ocean. The always self-controlled and controlling Meghan has checked out, and Bridget finds herself in a new role.

<b>Rise and Shine</b> is a razor-sharp meditation on our culture’s celebrity obsession. Its uncanny timeliness mirrors the way even serious journalists have become fodder for entertainment: Katie Couric is poised to begin her work as the first female solo anchor of an evening network news program, yet one of the first questions reporters asked was what she’ll wear during her first broadcast. But <b>Rise and Shine</b> also is a poignant story of sisterhood, and the universal struggle to find one’s true purpose. Quindlen’s superb, generous storytelling has never been more rewarding. <i>Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.</i>

What is it with Anglo-Saxon writers and the Mediterranean? For many of them, from E.M. Forster to Elizabeth Bowen, from Elizabeth von Arnim to Henry James (an honorary Brit) and now Irish author Maeve Binchy, the Mediterranean can’t be a normal spot where one goes “on holiday,” and simply comes back with a tan. Something cataclysmic and life-changing must happen because the folks in Greece or Italy are so much closer to nature, and thus to their emotions. Their job is to teach those pale and buttoned-up folks how to loosen up. Fortunately, many of these tales and authors redeem themselves by being quite good, and Binchy’s Nights of Rain and Stars is no exception.

The story concerns four tourists who meet in a Greek village, drawn to a taverna by the sight of a pleasure boat burning in the bay. All four are going through crises partially caused by their inability to, as Forster says, “connect.” Elsa, a German TV reporter, is running away from the love of her life, whose neglect of his daughter reminds her too much of her own father’s abandonment. Fiona, an Irish nurse, is running away from reality with her utter lout of a boyfriend. Thomas, who’s from laid-back California, is running away from his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, and the fear of losing his young son. David is escaping his demanding and dismissive father. Vonni, an Irish expat who came to the village with her Greek lover only to be dumped by him, and Andreas, the owner of the taverna, are the catalysts who pull the others back into life and love. Binchy’s writing is simple and straightforward, surprisingly so, and this is a straightforward, if not simple, tale. Readers used to a certain floridity about modern novels might take up the book with some suspicion. But by the end, you realize that its plainness is exactly what’s needed. Nights of Rain and Stars is an unexpectedly absorbing and striking work from one of Ireland’s best writers. Arlene McKanic writes from Jamaica, New York.

Past tense is as important as present tense in Anita Shreve’s delicate story of growing emotional and physical maturity, glimpsed and gained through two painful years of memories and hope.

As Light on Snow opens, 12-year-old Nicky Dillon (telling the story 22 years later) doesn’t realize the unreality of the life she and her father are living after the traumatic loss of her mother and baby sister in a car wreck. After the accident, the grieving survivors moved to another state and began a shadowy existence, separating themselves from all the people and habits that marked their former life. All that changes when, shortly before Christmas, Nicky and her father discover a newborn baby girl left in the snowy woods to die. The police seem to take a quizzical view of their discovery (could the secretive Robert Dillon be the baby’s father?), which opens up the Dillons’ world to vulnerability and change. When a hurting stranger shows up at their door a few days later, Nicky finds herself yearning for connections that promise a return to normal family life once again.

Anita Shreve has written 10 other well-received novels, each one in a deceptively simple style that teases human insights out of straightforward prose. She has a knack for the fortunate metaphor (Robert’s grief is “a hard nut within his chest”; Nicky’s grandmother is ” a good person to hug because her body fills up all the empty spaces”).

Two years of unresolved sadness and anger at fate become part of a useful past, as Shreve details the unwilling, importunate surrender of anguish by Nicky and her father. In return they receive an uncertain but hopeful grasp on the possibilities of Christmases yet-to-come. At long last, the future tense becomes possible once again. Maude McDaniel writes from Maryland