Female friendships are powerful fodder for many novels. Off Keck Road, Mona Simpson's newest book, is a quirky, free-flowing paean to the vagaries and complexities of female friendships.

The novel opens in 1956 when Bea Maxwell, home from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, drives out to a new housing development to visit with a sorority sister, June Umberhum. The development, off Keck Road, is on the outskirts of Green Bay and is populated with many "ruddy, unminded children. In this deceptively simple novel, a wealthy girl grows up, goes to college, moves to the big city but soon returns home. Along the way, she makes a few friends, deals with her aging parents and makes a living. But in that simplicity lies the truth of most of our lives: we grow up, we go to school, we settle down. But, there is always more to everyone's life, and there is more to the life of Bea and June. Bea comes home and stays home. That's what makes this novel so memorable.

Bea, in her mother Hazel's estimation, could have been popular, could have had boyfriends and could have gone to proms. Why didn't she? Bea is the girl in high school who leads committees, hangs the decorations and gets things done. She seems "oblivious to the whole underworld of flirtation, as if she were missing the receiving wires. Bea also knits. It is not the occasional knitting of the novice or the practical knitting of people in cold climates. Bea sends away to Italy for fine cashmere yarns and knits one complicated garment after another, clicking her way through meetings and long dateless evenings.

In this meandering novel, the story is told through the eyes of many characters at different points in time. There is Shelley, a girl who contracts polio from the vaccine, and Hazel, who muses on her maternal failings. But mostly, we have the complex and unusual main character, Bea, interested in men but woefully deficient in her knowledge of the dances of relationship. She does what she is supposed to: she cares for her parents, forgives her perfect sister, works hard, knits baby gifts and calls on birthdays. In the end, Mona Simpson has written the lives of many women through her Everywoman, Bea. There is enough of her in each of us to make this a memorable story.

Robin Smith teaches school in Nashville.

Let's face it. Not every writer has been able to make the leap from the romance category to mainstream fiction without producing a literary stumble or losing a bit of her audience. That is not the case for Donna Hill, dubbed the queen of African-American romance, whose latest novel, If I Could, features many of the author's trademark qualities: strong characterizations, complex moral questions and absorbing plot lines. Regina Everette, the book's heroine, is having a mid-life crisis of monumental proportions. A journalist, she fights emotional burnout from one too many crime stories, insensitive editors with a need for the grisly and sensational, and grueling deadlines. Her restlessness has now seeped into her life after hours, shattering the false calm of her sedate marriage with the seemingly perfect husband. That sense of emptiness and frustration compels her to leave Russell, her husband, and her job on the newspaper for a chance to find her own peace and follow her dream of being her own boss. Neither her husband, children or friends know what to make of this sudden transformation in Regina and hope she'll snap out of it. Hill does a fine job of detailing her character's inner conflicts without sinking into a tirade of psychobabble and soapy pathos. Even Regina, as Hill portrays her, seems to be making it up as she goes along.

Nobody is more spooked by the changes in Regina's personality than her two gal-pals, Antoinette and Victoria, but they fail to persuade her to hold on to what they see as the perfect life. The turmoil in Regina's life forces her friends to question what is happening in their own tidy, stale existences and to realize that neither of them is truly satisfied with her own identity as a woman or a wife.

Hill uses her trio of female characters to ask a bevy of moral questions that probably confront most women at some point in their lives. First, how much are you willing to sacrifice for your own brand of happiness? Second, are you willing to deal with the consequences of your choices without excessive regret and second-guessing? To put these questions and others under the spotlight, she creates a series of engrossing scenes that delve deeply into the timely issues of female enpowerment, self-determination, race, class and the duality of choice.

As the novel proceeds, both of Regina's girlfriends watch their own lives derail, while their floundering buddy slowly regains her footing and reclaims her life on her own terms.

If I Could should be a welcome treat for Hill's fans of her unconventional romance novels as well as a revelation for critics soured on the ongoing series of cookie-cutter relationship fiction coming to market. This is commercial fiction with heart, soul and bite.

Spying is a complicated business, and that's not even counting the spying part. The intelligence acronyms are hard enough to keep straight (FI, CI, HUMINT, COMMI). Besides that, there are "covert, overt, clandestine, and paramilitary" categories of each. Lulu is FI/HUMINT/NOC, and lower echelon enough to find human intelligence "an oxymoron."However, she's pleased to discover official duties and her romantic inclinations mesh when she is assigned to Morocco. It's a "basic mission" to update the database with a long – term goal of battling extremist Muslim groups. The best part of the assignment is that it will enable her to rekindle her "little love affair with Ian Drumm," with whom she had worked in international aid in Kosovo.

Ian, who runs a luxurious haven for expatriate Europeans and Americans in Marrakech, warmly welcomes her reappearance, but seems preoccupied. In the process of identifying several citizens who are not what they appear to be, Lulu also finds herself in a subtle tug – of – war for Ian's attentions.Lulu in Marrakech is espionage light, but Diane Johnson is practiced at balancing the knotty questions of varying cultural constraints against self – centered, yet often freedom – based, Western values. Lulu's interactions with a suspicious Saudi couple, an American gay twosome with a child, a Moroccan colonel, a girl in danger of being killed by her brother, and a number of other citizens along the way embroil her in a dubious development where life turns serious and the truth is hard to read.

Johnson, author of 14 previous books, has been a finalist several times for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Her latest novel is consistently absorbing, though plagued by an unresolved ambivalence, which probably reflects the nature of the subject itself. Readers might find themselves wondering at the end why anyone would want to be a spy, though the intermittent excitement probably makes up for other shortfalls. One thing's for sure – Lulu would testify to it – if you want to be a really good spy, don't fall in love.

Romeo Cacciamani and Julie Roseman are rival florists in Boston, whose families have hated each other for as long as anyone can remember (although no one can recall why). After 15 years apart, these two 60-somethings meet again at a small business convention where both are trying to salvage their family business. At last, animosity withers and attraction blooms instead.

The two quickly become lovebirds, and they aren't about to let something as trivial as a generations-long feud stand in the way of romance. But their respective families feel differently. Romeo's octogenarian mother, Julie's meddling ex-husband, and a cast of Cacciamani and Roseman children intervene with a hatred that matches the couple's love.

Julie and Romeo is the first novel from Jeanne Ray, mother of Ann Patchett, the best-selling author of The Magician's Assistant. Ray, a 60-something herself, has created a funny, sexy leading lady who shows that there is life and love after children, grandchildren, divorce, and age 60. The novel picks up the pace with each chapter as Ray falls into an easy rhythm. Her characters get funnier and each situation zanier than the last. Ray never fails to find the humor as Julie and Romeo face just about every obstacle on the road to romance. You'll be laughing out loud at the crazy things the two families do to spite one another, and one or two of the down-to-earth, flawed characters are likely to remind you of someone from your own family.

Julie struggles to maintain her sanity as she tries to keep her new relationship under wraps, her two daughters turn into nagging mothers, and the flower shop gets closer and closer to going under.

Think Montagues and Capulets, but unlike that tragic story, it's hard to guess what Julie and Romeo's outcome will be. This is a love story, but after some family feuding lands Romeo in the hospital, the future doesn't look too rosy. With just the right amount of sassiness and assertiveness, Julie feels like every woman fighting for love. Her characters fall in love early on, but Ray does a fine job keeping us guessing who will end up with whom. Wise, witty, and thoroughly modern, Julie and Romeo is a fun novel for anyone who thinks love is easy.

Stephanie Swilley, who graduated from college in May, wonders if she'll be 60 before she finds her Romeo.

The search for a soulful and completing love is a theme as old as stories, and recent bestsellers have struggled to convey that theme in all its universal, weighty and romantic glory. Jonathan Hull, in a gorgeous debut novel, achieves that feat gracefully and simply, with a spare structure full of compassionate ideas and astounding metaphors.

Losing Julia is narrated by Patrick Delaney, an 81-year-old World War I veteran dying in the Great Oaks assisted living community. The story begins with his recollection of his first trip back to France 10 years after the war. Delaney brings his wife and son overseas for the unveiling of a memorial etched with names of friends His killed in a horrific battle, but his wife can't bear the idea, and he attends the service alone. The moment the cloth is pulled down, he looks across the crowd and recognizes the beautiful Julia, a painter and the intended fiancée of his mentor Daniel, who was killed on the battlefield. Delaney had only heard Julia described by Daniel, but he knows her at once. Shyly introducing themselves, they realize that they have a few days to visit with each other before Delaney must return to his wife and young son waiting in Paris, and Julia to her daughter in America. She is desperate to know about Daniel's last days, and Delaney yearns to reveal everything in his soul about war and loss and how life will never be the same for him.

Julia's intelligence and warmth remind Delaney of Daniel, and he falls deeply in love for the first time in his life—the one thing that his best friend said could change his world forever. As Delaney the elder looks back on a love rooted in tragedy and a friend's aborted life, the time frame shifts subtly between a young man's innocence and disillusionment, a married man's desire for consuming passion, and an old man's wisdom about their connection.

Delaney's memories return him again and again to the memorial, to France, and to both the horrors and transformational love he experienced there. Delaney comes full circle at the end of his life, realizing that even unrequited love can be a positive life force, as long as it's a true melding of souls and the most intimate self. Hull's confidence and mastery turn an economy of words and emotions into art. Scenes of war and making love are described with an equal and stunning starkness, leaving space for infinite longing and meaning.

Deanna Larson is a reviewer in Nashville.

Reading Anita Shreve's novel The Pilot's Wife is like unraveling a thread. From the moment Kathryn Lyons answers the late-night knock at her door, she and the reader are set upon a course that eventually reveals that the life Kathryn thought was one way was really another.

Kathryn is married to Jack, a pilot on the Boston-London run. They have a 15-year old daughter, Mattie, and a charming old house in a small New England beach town. It's a normal-enough life. They have a normal-enough marriage: Kathryn and Jack were once passionately in love, and now, years later, they have grown comfortable and separate.

When Kathryn answers that late-night knock, she is told that Jack's plane exploded off the coast of Ireland. Adding to her horror are airline investigators, pilots union investigators, and TV crews all looking for Kathryn to reveal something about Jack that will lead them to the source of the explosion. Each day, it seems, the news generates new bits of information and rumors. Each day there is a new wrinkle in what might have been a simple, tragic story: Take a family of three and subtract one.

At first, Kathryn can't believe that the explosion was anything other than an accident. She knows Jack, after all, and she knows that he wasn't involved in any political causes. He enjoyed hockey and playing on his computer, and being with his wife and daughter. But, in the slow and horrible way that the truth often reveals itself, bits and pieces of Jack's life surface that don't fit with Kathryn's picture of him. Found in Jack's pants pocket is an envelope with an initial marked on it (not a "K"). There's a receipt for a silken bathrobe that never arrives at Kathryn's house. And Jack, she later learns, did not spend his last night at the crew apartment in London.

The novel is essentially a mystery, with Kathryn playing the unwilling sleuth who must follow her husband's trail backwards all the way to Ireland. When she hires a boatman to take her to the crash site, Kathryn circles the wreckage and says, "To be relieved of love . . . was to give up a terrible burden." Because Kathryn is so distraught and grief-stricken, she doesn't add up the clues as fast as the reader, making the book a little slow at times. However, when Kathryn essentially solves the mystery of Jack, she realizes that she never knew him, and she never will. Her search leads her not only to some answers, but to a realization that the possibility is slim of ever fully knowing those we love, even those we love the most.

Nicholas Sparks waves his magic romance wand once again, this time over the ideal of transformational first love. In A Walk to Remember, Landon Carter narrates the flashback story of his senior year in the late 1950s at Beaufort High in Beaufort, North Carolina, when he first discovers the power of love.

The Carters are a family whose wealth was built on a grandfather's profits from bootlegging. Compounding the lack of strong male figures in Landon's life is his hypocritical congressman father, who rarely spends time at home. Neglect pushes Landon to develop a rebellious streak, and at the start of the story he is both adrift and certain, confident and susceptible to peer opinion in other words, a typical teenager. There is more than a touch of Holden Caulfield in his character when he encounters Jamie Sullivan, the daughter of a local minister and the goody-two-shoes of the school. Jamie is such social poison to Landon's insecure circle that he avoids her at all costs, until, as the newly elected class president desperate for a date to the dance, he asks her, certain that she'll be available. She accepts, and that night Jamie helps Landon out of an embarrassing bind, revealing a strong character that intrigues him despite her relentless and isolating Christianity.

After Jamie asks Landon to star in the school's Christmas play, a town tradition which her father instituted, he develops a gradual and reluctant relationship with her. They rehearse, they walk home, they talk; when opening night arrives and Landon sees Jamie in an angelic costume, he realizes that he's fallen in love. Bewildered and ecstatic, they nurture their feelings until Jamie reveals the secret that forces Landon to realize what he holds most dear, despite what fate has handed them.

Sparks is a modern master of fateful love stories and road-not-taken fables written in uncluttered prose. A Walk to Remember is perfect autumn fiction, when thoughts turn to changes and life's journeys, both mapped and unmapped.

Deanna Larson is a songwriter in Nashville.

In an industry which frequently treats actresses like chattel—props to enhance leading men—Michelle Pfeiffer is an anomaly. After making her mark with her show-stopping beauty in movies including Scarface and Ladyhawke, she won over the critics and garnered a trio of Oscar nominations in movies including The Fabulous Baker Boys. She's had crowd-pleasing stints, too—as via her turn in that form-fitting feline suit in Batman Returns. Should we be surprised then that she turned her box office clout into producing power? Or that in her quest for good material in which to star, the one-time catwoman pounced after reading The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard?

Pfeiffer had competition. Astute Oprah Winfrey-watchers may recall that the book received the talk show queen's first on-the-air book endorsement. Moreover, Winfrey was said to be interested in a movie version. But Pfeiffer snared the project, which explores every mother's harrowing nightmare: the abduction of a child. Yet there is another layer to The Deep End of the Ocean. No thriller, this is a complex examination of family relationships. Along with exploring the aftermath of a child's disappearance, the book looks at the effect of a child's reappearance years later. Like life, the book does not provide easy answers. The character of the mother is equally true to life. She is flawed, not perfect.

But then Pfeiffer has long been drawn to multi-dimensional characters, including those with their origin in books, contemporary and classic. She was both producer and star of Dangerous Minds (St. Martin's), about former Marine LouAnne Johnson and her tour of duty as an inner-city school teacher. Earlier, she ventured into John Le Carre's world of espionage opposite Sean Connery in The Russia House (Bantam). And on the lighter side, she conjured up trouble alongside Cher, Susan Sarandon, and the devilish Jack Nicholson for a Hollywood take on John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick (Ballantine).

More recently, she was the mysterious Countess Olenska in The Age of Innocence (Collier Books), based on Edith Wharton's compelling look at the New York upper-crust, circa the gas-lit 1870s. And she will be among the starry players—who will also include Calista Flockhart (of TV's Ally McBeal, which is produced by Pfeiffer's husband David E. Kelley)—in the upcoming retelling of Shakespeare's roguish romantic tale A Midsummer Night's Dream (due out in May). Pfeiffer will portray Titania, Queen of the Fairies. Which means she will, literally, be a regal presence.

“I was born blue.” This is our introduction to Kali Jai, named after the goddess of destruction in the Hindu pantheon. When we meet Kali again decades later, she is known as Paula Vauss, a brash, sharp-tongued Atlanta lawyer and narrator of Joshilyn Jackson’s new novel, The Opposite of Everyone.

Paula is a successful divorce attorney in her mid-30s, handling mostly BANK (Both Assholes, No Kids) cases. Her love life constitutes a series of sabotaged romances—the second a relationship begins to smell of intimacy or monogamy, she runs the other way. Her only family is her mother, to whom she has not spoken since college. Their only form of contact is a monthly check that Paula dutifully mails to frequently changing addresses. It is clear that Paula has managed to avoid dealing with her troubled past by pouring herself into her career. But when one of her checks is returned, Paula realizes her mother has gone missing, and she is finally forced to confront her traumatic history—with the help of her longtime friend and erstwhile lover who means more to her than she is willing to admit.

The Opposite of Everyone hurtles forward at a breakneck pace and is chock full of twists. Paula’s brutal honesty and loyal heart will make readers root for her. Jackson has woven a multilayered story that uses both folklore and mythology to explore the deep bond of mother to child and the way that the tales we tell can both define and constrain us.