Many people, especially women, maintain friendships over a period of time, and form a support system that sees them through life’s many ups and downs.

Joanna Trollope’s twentieth novel, City Of Friends, is about one such group of women--the four women friends in the book are in their late forties and all successful working professionals. They take their work seriously and enjoy their success without guilt about neglecting family or personal life. They are always there for one another, and this kind of friendship is rare.

Stacey, Beth, Gaby and Melissa became friends in college, where they were the only four females studying economics. The book seems to say that women can’t have it all—at least not forever. The first life to unravel is Stacey’s, who is unceremoniously fired from her high-level finance job because she asks for flexi-time. Her mother, who has always been supportive of her education and independence, suffers from dementia and Stacey decides on home care, and her husband Steve agrees to turn their lives upside down so that she can care for her mother, who is reduced to a sad shell of her former vibrant self.

The loss of her job is traumatic for Stacey, not so much for financial reasons but because she cannot imagine not working at a career at which she has excelled. At the same time, her husband gets a promotion and there is some tension between them because of that.

Beth, who is an author and expert on business psychology, is in a relationship with a younger woman, Claire, who takes advantage of her wealth and influence, but walks out on her nonetheless. Gaby is an investment banker with three children and a husband going through a mid-life crisis. The most heart-breaking story is that of Melissa, who has a son, Tim, from brief relationship. The boy’s father casually walks back into his life and Tim is enamoured of a ‘real’ family with his new American partner, two young sons and a daughter from an earlier relationship, leaving his doting mother bereft.

The men in the book are relatively stress free and not all that disturbed by domestic upheavals. Gaby’s husband, for instance, is not too bothered about the romance of his thirteen-year-old daughter with Tim, but Gaby, is worried about her daughter’s wellbeing. Teen flings rarely last and what if her child is hurt by rejection? There is also a bit of complication about Gaby not offering Stacey a job when she well could, because she has hidden something from her friend, and Melissa’s role in getting Stacey’s husband a job.

Everything does turn out well as can be for the friends—through Trollope’s does leave some strands loose—but there is the lingering sadness for what they went through—Stacey and Melissa in particular, because their small tragedies are not of their own making. Beth tells one of her students: “When I went to a reunion of all the women I’d done my own MBA with, there wasn’t a single one who had managed to succeed in combining a career, motherhood and marriage. Lots of them had two out of the three, and it was invariably marriage that was the casualty.” Sadly, even today, most men do not face the same problems. So even though women’s home-profession dilemma is a bit overdone, it can still power a well-plotted bestseller.

The book makes the reader care for the problems the women are facing, because they are so relatable. Which career woman has not felt guilty about not giving her family enough time, and which stay-at-home woman has not craved the excitement and glamour of a career. And which woman approaching her fifties has not panicked about aging.

City Of Friends
By Joanna Trollope
Publisher PanMacmillan
Pages: 336