The author of the "graceful and compassionate" (People) New York Times bestseller Carry the One presents a new and long-awaited novel exploring what happens when untested people are put to a hard test, and in its aftermath, find themselves in a newly uncertain world. It's the fall of 2016. Cate, a set designer in her early forties, lives and works in Chicago's theater community. She has stayed too long at the fair and knows it's time to get past her prolonged adolescence and stop taking handouts from her parents. She has a firm plan to get solvent and settled in a serious relationship. She has tentatively started something new even as she's haunted by an old, going-nowhere affair. Her ex-husband, recently booted from his most recent marriage, is currently camped out in Cate's spare bedroom, in thrall to online conspiracy theories, and she's not sure how to help him. Her best friend Neale, a yoga instructor, lives nearby with her son and is Cate's...

Nora and Fern are just like any other mother and daughter - their relationship is tumultuous, marked by brooding silences and curt exchanges. For Nora, Fern is an enigma - incomprehensible, unfindable. Fern has never really forgiven her mother for leaving her marriage to live with her lover, Jeanne. Their story is a contemporary one, in which mothering is a mapless journey and children are left to form themselves in the shadows cast by idiosyncratic parenting. Here, too, is the reality that perfectly reasonable people will find some way to throw a wrench into the smooth, well-oiled workings of their lives. Nora's relationship with Jeanne has settled into domestic stability, triggering in Nora a familiar restlessness that leads to an affair. When Fern intuits her mother's indiscretion, she looks to the two people she depends on most: her uncle Harold and her best friend, Tracy, who now has the overwhelming task of raising a baby. As Fern begins to take on more of the baby's care herself, she discovers some of the powerful ambiguities of parental love - and starts to find her way back to her own mother.Carol Anshaw has been praised for her "warmhearted sympathies and lively wit" (Newsday). LUCKY IN THE CORNER, with the author's inimitable humor and insight, shows us the way a family reconfigures itself as unexpected changes come its way - and how, no matter what shape it takes, it remains a family.