Sarah and Harriet have led parallel lives ever since they went to boarding school together. Now in their fifties, they are widowed within three months of each other. Sarah and Harriet gradually come to terms with each other, the men they buried and the life that continues to go on around them.

Shelby Hearon's excellent twelfth novel opens, "And they lived happily ever after." It ends, "Once upon a time." The opening and closing lines echo many of the themes of the novel. The book opens with Cile Tate leaving her Presbyterian preacher husband to return to the early love of her life, Drew Williams. The fact that Cile and Drew are both married complicates things, and they have to bring four lives to endings and beginnings.
When Cile decides to leave Eben Tate, she is amazed when he announces her abandonment of him and their two daughters from his pulpit. She doesn't even have a...

"The Second Dune," Shelby Hearon's second novel, was published in 1973 and won the Texas Institute of Letters Award as the best book of fiction of the year. Written when Hearon was forty-three and just before her divorce, the novel is seen from the point of view of suburban housewives and their mothers and daughters.
Ellen Marshall, divorced and remarried, is troubled by her son's refusal to accept her second husband, but takes great comfort from the five-year-old daughter of her second marriage. She hopes to be able to pass on to her daughter some of the knowledge that only women possess...