New York Times-bestselling author Marisa Silver is well-known for finely observed and exquisitely written characters whose lives illuminate subtle truths about life in America. In AT LAST, Silver takes as her subject the relationship of two women, formidable and competitive, thrown into an unwelcome lifelong relationship by the marriage of their children. The result, as Paul Yoon says, “is both a vast and soulfully intimate chronicle of the ties that bind family–and the power of all the decisions one makes across the years–[and] is quite simply, her best book yet.”

Set in mid-century Midwestern America, AT LAST introduces readers to Helene Simonauer and Evelyn Turner, two women who are vastly different but equally sharp, cunning, and fully committed to their opinions about love, marriage, God, and how a person ought to be. Silver tells the story of the women over the course of their lives, singly and together: tracking them from their individual childhoods; to the moments in midlife when their children’s wedding and the birth of their child force them into a relationship filled with competition and, finally, begrudging affection. Silver sets all of this against the backdrop of a century full of change. “Whole lives course down the decades, and every minute is conveyed with Silver’s signature combination of toughness and grace,” raves Laird Hunt (Zorrie).

The germ for AT LAST is a childhood moment lodged in Silver’s memory: When she was four years old, her grandmother said to her while driving to her counterpart’s home: “I know you love me more than her.” Readers of this book will find themselves reflecting on the women they grew up with in all their complexity, filling in blanks between the details they know or remember about them, considering what their younger lives might have been like, and wondering how they felt about those who came, unbidden, into their lives through marriage. This is a book for readers of Elizabeth Strout, Anne Tyler, and Marilynne Robinson, great chroniclers of family and setting; and also for readers of Elena Ferrante, great chronicler of the twists and turns of a long relationship, and examiner of the primary role of ego.