Jules, Quincy, Chloe and Talia came together a decade ago when they became roommates in a much-desired Manhattan apartment. Over the ten years, though they remain friends who stay in touch and get together, they have each gone their own way with their lives, jobs, boyfriends and children. Now, ten years later, the four friends find their personal lives are unraveling and their paths are intersecting with jobs, their children’s school and a much sought-after apartment. This is a rich story about women, friends and testing friendships.

The circle of four female friends becomes a bit of a tangled web when Jules de Marco, forty-something and still unmarried and without children, tells her short, bald, cheap boyfriend Arthur about the apartment Quincy is checking out. Though Arthur is someone Jules can call her own, she just isn’t sure that she wants to do that.

Quincy is trying for a baby again after a miscarriage and has discovered her dream apartment. Quincy is at odds with Jules after she tells her about the apartment, and Jules then relays the information to Arthur, who wants it for himself.

Chloe, a trophy wife and mother, is job sharing with her friend Talia. She has just hired a Tibetan nanny to help raise her son, whom she is determined to enroll in a prestigious private school. Chloe is at odds with Talia when she finds out from Arthur about the job lead and suspects that Talia is trying to steal it away from her.

Talia is married to Tom and thinks that, compared to her friends, she is a ‘third world country.’ She has not only just discovered and ‘borrowed’ Chloe’s lead for a promising new job, and she is attempting to enroll her own child in the same exclusive school.

Sally Koslow tells this tale of friendship with skill and humor. Her female characters are rich with personality and detail in their roles as single women, girlfriends, working mothers and wives, but most of all with all the emotional and mental processes of the forty-something woman. The internal and external conflict experienced by these women as they deal with their jobs and day-to-day interactions with each other, their spouses and their partners can be surprising, distressing, annoying, funny and credible. With Friends Like These is a story about women and their friendship with one another before and after ‘life claimed other loyalties.” This finely crafted, entertaining story will remind you of your own friendships with all their attendant ups and downs. Highly recommended.