Second Chances

“Alice Adams turns dreams and moments, the stuff of memories, inside out and makes of them beautiful, haunting, bittersweet tales.”   —Publishers Weekly
 
 Second Chances, perhaps Alice Adams most accomplished novel, is a rich, moving, and beautifully drawn portrait of six women and men, friends for years, who suddenly, and with amazement, find themselves growing old.
 
They live in a beautiful small California town called San Sebastian, and they see each other almost daily– Dudley and Sam Venable; Edward Crane and his younger lover, Freddy Fuentes; the widowed Celeste Timberlake; the eccentric, secretive Polly Blake. With generosity and humor and remarkable insight, Adams takes us into rich emotional territory in a novel that evokes the ways in which people continually astonish themselves, at any age, with their capacity for wonder and change.