Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of Meg Waite Clayton's beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family.

In the late 1960s, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally begin meeting every Wednesday at the park in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet mainly by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love. These "Wednesday Sisters" seem to have little in common: Frankie is the timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of literature—Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens—and the Miss America Pageant they watch together every year.

As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers' circle to parlay their hopes and dreams through poems, stories and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making—Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a Women's Movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves—while at the same time supporting each other through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success.