Books by Susan Kelly

Now You Know

Assigned as college roommates in 1947, Frances Wilson and Libba Charles forged an unlikely friendship of opposites that ended only with Frances’s lingering death decades later. Now, Frances’s three grown daughters, who have never been close, struggle with loss and grief as they battle their personal demons. Alice is the control freak who fears she’ll have nothing to show for her life as "only a mother"; Allegra is a belligerent recovering alcoholic separated from her husband and children; Edie, the youngest, is chronically disorganized, inept, and commitment phobic. More

The Last of Something

As Shotsie Brooks prepares her mother's beach cottage for a weekend of guests, close friends since college twenty years earlier, she senses something sadly final about their gathering. Perhaps it's summer's end, or melancholy brought on by her recent hysterectomy. Perhaps it's her husband's incomprehensible white collar crime, or her mother's increasing senility, or memories of Ian — loveable, incorrigible Ian — that the setting evokes for Shotsie. Perhaps it's the sad shape of the cottage itself, past its prime and suffering the weatherbeaten effects of a previous hurricane. And nearly as soon as the women arrive -- before the men, of course, to make the beds and buy the groceries--comes the news of a hurricane growing and blowing somewhere off the coast of Cuba. More

Even Now

When her husband Hal accepts a teaching position at a private school in the tiny North Carolina town of Rural Ridge, Hannah Marsh views her family's move as a chance to return to a simpler, sweeter way of living. Contentedly married for seventeen years, and the mother of two children, she nevertheless has a nagging sense that something is absent from her life. Then, at a casual neighborhood dinner, Hannah encounters someone she believed she'd never see again: Daintry O'Connor, a ghost from her girlhood. More

How Close We Come

How Close We Come is the story of Ruth and Pril, next door neighbors and intimate friends, whose children are close friends as well. The two women share every detail of their lives, from gossip to parenting advice to keeping secrets from their husbands. Then, after ten years of remarkable intimacy, and without letting Pril know, Ruth leaves. She simply packs up her children for a vacation out West and never returns. Pril is bewildered, and angry, and most of all, terribly lonely. When Ruth's husband Reed sues for custody, he names Pril as his witness, and her impending testimony is a terrible dilemma, a painful test of her loyalty. She's torn between the friend who has deliberately abandoned her, and her duty and obligation to truth. Matters are worsened by Pril's husband Scotty, who firmly sides with Reed. Husband and wife argue bitterly over responsibility and compassion and morality and the nature of love: conflicts and issues mirrored in their own marriage More