If you like Joanna Trollope's focus on friendship...
...here's another couple of great reads...
The Future Homemakers of America by Laurie Graham
Filled with warmth, wit and wisdom, The Future Homemakers of America takes us to the heart of female friendship. A novel fans of The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood will not be able to resist. It is Norfolk, in 1953, and the Fens have never seen anything quite like the girls from USAF Drampton: overpaid, overfed, and over here. While their men patrol the skies keeping the Soviets at bay, some are content to live the life of the Future Homemakers of America; clipping coupons, cooking chicken pot pie. Others however, start to stray, looking for a little native excitement beyond the perimeter fence. Out there in the freezing fens they meet Kath Pharaoh, a tough but warm Englishwoman. Bonds are forged, uniting the women in friendship that will survive distant postings, and the passage of forty years.
A Patchwork Planet by Anne Tyler
Barnaby Gaitlin is a loser - just short of thirty, he's the black sheep of a philanthropic Baltimore family. Once upon a time, he had a home, a loving wife, a little family of his own; now he has an ex-wife, a 9-year old daughter with attitude, a Corvette Sting Ray that's a collector's item but unreliable, and he works as hired muscle for Rent-a-Back, doing heavy chores for old folks. He has an almost pathological curiosity about other people's lives, which has got him into serious trouble in the past, and a hopeless charm which attracts the kind of angelic woman who wants to save him from himself. Tyler's observation is more acute, more delicious than ever; her humour slyer and more irresistible; her characters so vividly realised that you feel you've known this quirky collection for ever. With perfect pitch and poise, humour and humanity, Anne Tyler chronicles, better than any writer today, the sublime and the ridiculous of everyday living, the foibles and frailties of the ordinary human heart.
