Think marriage means happily-ever-after? Think again… Selina and Lottie are complete opposites. Where Selina is poised but prudish, Lottie is quirky and emotional. Selina is the dutiful mother of three children and able manager of their stylish suburban home. Lottie lives with her eccentric teenage daughter in a small city apartment fit to bursting with color and happy chaos. But these women also have one shocking similarity: they're married to the same man…and they've just found out he's dead. Selina has been married to Simon Busfield for twenty-eight years, Lottie for seventeen. Neither knows a thing about the other until the day of Simon's funeral, where the scandalous truth is revealed in front of everyone they know. Another wife, another family… And they've onlyjust scratched the surface of Simon's incredible betrayal. With dark humor and razor-sharp wit, Cohen expertly unravels a story of deception and betrayal, where two very different families will discover they are entwined in ways that will change them all forever. "Witty, ludicrously melodramatic and psychologically perceptive." —Sunday Telegraph "A cracking debut…. Fatal Attraction with a clever twist at the end. Addictive." —The Bookseller on The Mistress's Revenge

In these moving stories if Angelina Grimké Weld, wife of abolitionist Theodore Weld, Varina Howell Davis, wife of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, and Julia Dent grant, wife of Ulysses S. Grant, Carol Berkin reveals how women understood the cataclysmic events of their day. Their stories, taken together, help reconstruct the era of the Civil War with a greater depth and complexity by adding women's experiences and voices to their male counterparts.

Imagine being happily married for 28 years. You have three children, a lovely house and a husband who travels a lot - but even after all this time, you still love each other. Or: imagine being happily married for 17 years. You have one daughter, a lovely home and though your husband travels a lot, you still love each other passionately. Then one day you get a call that turns your world upside down: your husband is dead. You are devastated. You go to the funeral... And come face to face with his other widow. Another wife, another family. It can't be true. It must be a mistake. It has to be her fault - all of it. Or: is it?With the sharp and witty scalpel she used in The Mistress's Revenge, Tamar Cohen lays bare the raw emotions thart underpin so-called normal family life and explores the hearts of two women forced to re-evaluate everything they thought they knew.

Illuminating a frequently neglected but extremely significant side of military history, "Intimate Strategies" is a rare and fascinating look at a critical aspect of Civil War commanders' lives--their marriages.

During the war in Sierra Leone (1991–2002), members of various rebel movements kidnapped thousands of girls and women, some of whom came to take an active part in the armed conflict alongside the rebels. In a stunning look at the life of women in wartime, Chris Coulter draws on interviews with more than a hundred women to bring us inside the rebel camps in Sierra Leone.When these girls and women returned to their home villages after the cessation of hostilities, their families and peers viewed them with skepticism and fear, while humanitarian organizations saw them primarily as victims. Neither view was particularly helpful in helping them resume normal lives after the war. Offering lessons for policymakers, practitioners, and activists, Coulter shows how prevailing notions of gender, both in home communities and among NGO workers, led, for instance, to women who had taken part in armed conflict being bypassed in the demilitarization and demobilization processes carried out by the international community in the wake of the war. Many of these women found it extremely difficult to return to their families, and, without institutional support, some were forced to turn to prostitution to eke out a living.Coulter weaves several themes through the work, including the nature of gender roles in war, livelihood options in war and peace, and how war and postwar experiences affect social and kinship relations.

Jessica Stirling's enthralling novel set in the darkest days of the Second World War. With her husband away in the army, mother-of-four Babs sends three of her darlings to the country and goes back to work. Her routine is disrupted, however, when a charming American news photographer walks into her life. Rosie's job as a factory worker is marred by the taunts of her snobbish co-workers. Eager to start a family but fearful of passing on her deafness to her children, she blames her husband for her unhappiness and risks not only her marriage but her future because of it. Wealthy and self assured, Polly manages her husband's shady empire, conducts a loveless affair with a lawyer, and tries to forget that her children now live with their father in New York. When Dominic explodes back into her life, Polly is forced to choose between loyalty and betrayal, and, as bombs begin to fall, tragedy overtakes the Conway girls.

Featured in Stylist's guide to 2019's best non-fiction books The true story of the fierce band of women who battled Washington - and Hanoi - to bring their husbands home from the jungles of Vietnam. On 12 February, 1973, one hundred and sixteen men who, just six years earlier, had been high flying Navy and Air Force pilots, shuffled, limped, or were carried off a huge military transport plane at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. These American servicemen had endured years of brutal torture, kept shackled and starving in solitary confinement, in rat-infested, mosquito-laden prisons, the worst of which was The Hanoi Hilton. Months later, the first Vietnam POWs to return home would learn that their rescuers were their wives, a group of women that included Jane Denton, Sybil Stockdale, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, Phyllis Galanti, and Helene Knapp. These women, who formed The National League of Families, would never have called themselves 'feminists', but they had become the POW and MIAs most fervent advocates, going to extraordinary lengths to facilitate their husbands' freedom - and to account for missing military men - by relentlessly lobbying government leaders, conducting a savvy media campaign, conducting covert meetings with antiwar activists, and most astonishingly, helping to code secret letters to their imprisoned husbands. In a page-turning work of narrative non-fiction, Heath Hardage Lee tells the story of these remarkable women for the first time. The League of Wives is certain to be on everyone's must-read list.