Elinor Mackey’s perfect marriage begins its slow disintegration when she picks up the phone and overhears her husband planning a non exercise-related rendezvous with his personal trainer, Gina. I want to cook for you, Gina says suggestively, and Elinor knows things have spun out of control.

Actually, in her more honest moments, Elinor will admit that the marriage has been in trouble for some time. Endless rounds of failed fertility treatment have left her and Ted numb, retreating to their separate corners. Elinor spends hours in the laundry room, while Ted ostensibly passes his time getting in shape at the gym.

Elinor follows her husband to Gina’s townhouse and watches helplessly as they abandon cooking for more unusual kitchen activities. He doesn’t love you, Gina! Elinor thinks, but it turns out that it’s not that simple: Ted finds himself in love with two very different women. To complicate matters even more, Gina’s troubled young son has come to live with her. In desperate need of a father figure, he clings to Ted as his new role model.

Things are a mess, to be sure. All involved are paralyzed, waiting for one of the others to make the decisions that will untangle this modern-day love triangle. Elinor, who’s long been at the mercy of science and fate in her efforts to have a baby, is unsure whether she has it in her to take charge of her life again.

Author Lolly Winston has an uncommonly deft touch while dealing with some of life’s heaviest topics. In her debut bestseller, Good Grief, Winston won acclaim for her moving portrayal of a young woman finding a new life after her husband’s death. Happiness Sold Separately is one of those wonderfully relatable gems that friends will pass around with a You have to read this recommendation. Sometimes bawdy, sometimes moving, always hilarious, this is a charming, generous book. Amy Scribner writes from Olympia, Washington.

As a newly minted med-school grad, Shelley Green finds herself installed at a pediatric practice on Manhattan’s wealthy Upper East Side in the hilarious 24-Karat Kids. She quickly finds her lifelong desire to heal at odds with the lifestyles of the newly rich and not-necessarily famous as weekends in the Hamptons and invitations to cocktail parties make her fiancŽ (and her old life) pale in comparison. Seduced by her new lifestyle (complete with a plush apartment and a hot heir-to-a-fortune boyfriend) and physically transformed by the demands of her job from an overweight girl from Queens to a sleek, sophisticated and sought-after physician, Shelley initially revels in her quick jaunt up the social ladder, but comes to realize that things on Park Avenue are rarely as perfect as they seem.

Real-life top doc Judy Goldstein and fiction writer Sebastian Stuart (The Mentor) make a fair pair. In this Nanny Diaries for the med set, they poke fun at the absurdity of modern hyper-parenting from a mother who needs to be taught to use a vacuum after being told that it would soothe her colicky baby, to an ex-actress seeking a nose job for her infant. For readers looking for a laugh, this is just what the doctor ordered.

Ex-model Robin Hazelwood conducts a guided tour down the runways of the late 1980s in her debut novel, Model Student. Before she knows it, Midwesterner Emily Woods finds herself at photo shoots with the same models whose images had previously been plastered on her bedroom walls. When the time comes to choose between college and catwalks, Emily decides she can do both, moving to New York City to attend Columbia University and pursue her dreams. It proves tougher to balance college life with the fashion world than Emily ever imagined. Doggedly pursuing her dual passions makes Emily start to spin out of control, until she finds herself flailing in both arenas and realizes that she may have to make a choice between brains and beauty.

Young Emily becomes an engaging protagonist, as her intelligence and thoughtfulness make the supreme superficiality of the fashion world palatable. Hazelwood’s sharp writing provides a glimpse into a glamorous world, but stays grounded by using college life as a foil to the fashionistas. Her real-life experience as model in the ’80s and ’90s the era that brought us those larger-than-life supermodels Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell gives her an insider edge that lends credibility to events that would be otherwise unbelievable.

When 29-year-old Delilah Darling reads in The New York Post that the average person has 10.5 sexual partners in a lifetime, Delilah decides to do a little counting of her own. She’s holding steady at 19 that is, until the day she gets fired from her production job on a Martha Stewart-esque television show and wakes up the next day hung over and in bed next to her smarmy ex-boss. Refusing to exceed the sexual status quo, Delilah takes her severance check and spends it on a cross-country drive down memory lane, visiting each of her previous partners in hopes she can make it work with one of them.

In 20 Times a Lady, author Karyn Bosnak guides her readers on this tour of past loves with a heaping dose of humor and heart. Her first book, Save Karyn, was an autobiographical account of her successful appeal to strangers (via the Internet) to help her pay off her credit card debt, and Bosnak here proves her ability to create a fictional character every bit as endearing as she was able to make herself. Though the obvious ending can be seen from a mile away (could the love she had been looking for have been in front of her the whole time?), readers will still root for Delilah in her quest to beat the odds.

New York Times best-selling author Jennifer Weiner offers a frank, funny and poignant look at new motherhood, marriage and friendship in her latest book, Little Earthquakes. This follow-up to Good in Bed and In Her Shoes (which became a motion picture starring Cameron Diaz) begins as Lia, an actress, returns to her hometown of Philadelphia from Hollywood to hide out after her baby’s sudden death. Heartbroken and filled with guilt, Lia cannot help but notice pregnant friends Becky, Ayinde and Kelly, three very different women who meet in yoga class and bond instantly. Becky is a wisecracking, overweight chef who worries that people will think she is just fat rather than pregnant. After her baby Ava arrives, she has to contend with the mother-in-law from hell, who tries to undercut Becky’s authority. Cool and elegant Ayinde is married to basketball star Richard Towne. Her own parents generally delegated their child-rearing obligations to nannies and other hired help, but Ayinde is determined to be an involved, loving mother to baby Julian despite her husband’s frequent absences. Peppy, blonde Kelly grew up in a big Catholic family with a mother who drank too much and a father who was content with the status quo. She has set her sights on having a perfect life and a perfect family in their perfect apartment, which they can barely afford even before her husband loses his job weeks before Oliver’s birth.

Each of the women soon discovers what every new mother discovers: babies change everything, including the best-laid plans. Wealth, race and religion notwithstanding, Becky, Ayinde and Kelly all find themselves wondering why it’s all so much harder yet ultimately more rewarding than they thought it would be.

Little Earthquakes will have readers laughing, crying and, if they’re mothers, nodding their heads in absolute understanding. This is a stay-up-all-night read that’s worth a little sleep deprivation.

Jackie Braun is a freelance writer and romance author from Flushing, Michigan.

In this witty, touching and funny debut novel, author Laura Dave seems to have her finger on the pulse of a generation of 20-somethings who have trouble dealing with the many choices in their lives.

Emmy Everett sees history repeating itself. Three years earlier, just weeks before her wedding, she left her engagement ring and her sleeping fiance in a highway motel in Rhode Island. Emmy didn’t travel far, and every day from the window of the bait and tackle shop where she works she can see the motel where she dumped Matt. Emmy says she’s there working on a video documentary project about the waiting wives of offshore fishermen but somehow her plan to talk to just four or five wives has become 107 interviews. Now Emmy is heading home to Manhattan to her brother Josh’s wedding where she discovers her beloved older brother, the brilliant doctor whose fiancee, Meryl, remains one of her closest friends, is experiencing the same qualms about his upcoming nuptials that Emmy had three years earlier. And Josh’s elaborate wedding is a little more than 24 hours away. Emmy wants to help Josh make the right choice, but is shocked to discover that her childhood hero’s cold feet are caused by a secret relationship with a hardworking, single mother who doesn’t seem at all like the other woman.

During the next few chaotic days, both Josh and Emmy will have to make some grown-up decisions. Peopled with likable and believable characters (and several odd, interesting ones), London Is the Best City in America will strike a chord with anyone having trouble making important decisions about jobs, relationships, grad school or family. Sweetly and sensitively told, this charming tale’s personal journey ends as it should not with a traditional cookie-cutter ending but with both growth and possibilities for Emmy. It’s no surprise that the film rights have been optioned by Reese Witherspoon.

Dedra Anderson writes from Colorado.

On one fateful night, 13-year-old Pearl becomes both a mother and a killer. Picked up by a cop while on the wrong side of town, Pearl caves to his advances and then accidentally shoots him as he takes his post-coital exit. Pearl’s son Leonard comes along just short of nine months later, and his youth is spent dodging the law alongside his mother until, one day, it finally catches up with her.

Except no one knows what happened to Pearl. She simply dropped off her precocious son with their neighbor, Mitch, on her way to work one morning and was never heard from again. And so 25-year-old Mitch finds himself saddled not only wih his computer business and his risky affair with the mayor’s wife, but also the sole responsibility for a five-year-old boy. Leonard is no ordinary child. Eerily intelligent, he has a severe degenerative disease that threatens his eyesight. Yet Leonard’s poor vision is countered by his perceptive heart. A firm believer in forever love (the idea that our loved ones never really leave us), Leonard routinely sees Pearl in a candle flame or a bird or a raindrop. Mitch is soon totally enamored of his new charge, unable to imagine life without Leonard. When social services splits them up, both Leonard and Mitch must re-evaluate their relationship, and they discover the many permutations of family in their search to uncover the mystery of Pearl’s disappearance.

As in her bestseller Pay It Forward (made into a movie staring Helen Hunt and Kevin Spacey), Catherine Ryan Hyde takes a tiny story and makes it feel epic. Narration flips between Mitch, Pearl, five-year-old Leonard and a teenaged Leonard to create a cacophony of unique voices in a haunting story about the power of love. Iris Blasi is a writer in New York City.

They’re two girls. With two different, thinking brains. And two separate, beating hearts. But the Darlen girls are forever joined in a way that makes them closer than even the closest of sisters: As conjoined twins, Rose (the studious one) and Ruby (the beautiful one) lead their lives while connected at the head by an area the size of a bread plate.

Lori Lansens’ The Girls imagines the twins’ attempt to record their autobiography as they approach their 30th birthday, a milestone that will make them the world’s oldest surviving craniopagus twins. Rose, an aspiring writer, is the primary author, but since she doesn’t live her life alone, she asks Ruby to contribute her own chapters. The resulting experience is like reading someone’s diary while being filled in on everything by her best friend. And so they tell their story. Abandoned by their unmarried teen mother shortly after she gives birth to them, the twins are adopted by Aunt Lovey (the nurse who delivered them) and her Slovakian-born husband, Stash. Their life in present-day, small-town Canada is almost astonishingly normal, as Lovey refuses to label them disabled. Just like anyone else, they fall in love, bicker with each other, root for the Red Sox and, generally, grow up.

Guided by two remarkably distinct voices, the novel unfolds subtly. Even as she settles into the linguistic artistry of an assured writer, Rose struggles aloud with the proper way to develop plot and character. Ruby, on the other hand, is an entirely unselfconscious writer, filling in the reader matter-of-factly on the momentous events Rose leaves out.

Ultimately, the novel is a testament to the transformative power of literature. Though Rose and Ruby set out simply to chronicle their past, the process of writing changes their present. Readers, too, will find themselves altered by this lyrical and haunting story. Iris Blasi is a writer in New York City.