Joan Barfoot: 4 books

Gwen Stone's life takes an abrupt nosedive when Edgar, her husband of twenty years, decides he isn't suited to marriage and leaves her for freedom and the cliché of a shiny new red convertible. But Edgar's own life takes a considerably worse nosedive when he and his new car are mowed down at a level...

What sort of woman sees an ad for a prison penpal and sets out to correspond with a convict she knows nothing of? It seems an unlikely number of women do exactly that in real life. In fiction, one of them is Jane Smith, an unusually withdrawn but otherwise unremarkable library clerk, who is propelled,...

One old woman crouches in a hedge, spying on a long-ago married lover. The other is the recent widow of a lifelong philanderer. Charlotte and Claudia have had quite different lives, one a single career social worker, the other a married career mother, but they've been friends since their youth, with...

Susannah is a journalist who considers herself something of a war correspondent from the front lines of domestic distress. Teddy, an ex-lover, is an artist and a protester on behalf of causes of peace — and the man Susannah chooses to father the child she wants. That turns out to be Lizzie, now...