Sarah and Harriet, friends since boarding school days, have gone through the rites of passage simultaneously: proms, marriage, childbirth, young motherhood--they even both had boys followed by girls. Now aged fifty-five, they have become widowed in the same year, and the differences that have lain dormant between them all this time finally begin to surface. Sarah, relieved that her married days are behind her, looks to the future, seeking out a life of serenity and self-reliance through communion with nature, small-business proprietorship, and her relationship with the mature Will Perry. Harriet, firmly entrenched in the past, seeks comfort from a younger man as refuge from the illness that threatens her very life and the coldness of the indifferent world that confronts a woman unprepared to be alone.

In the course of the novel, both women will come face to face with the meaning of the past--with all of its resonant force. Life Estates is a novel about the way we see--and fail to see--those we love; it is about missed connections; it is about the inability to ever truly know another human being. But Life Estates is also about people learning: people learning to have healthy relationships; people learning to stand alone when their relationships fail them; people learning to accept themselves as valid human beings in their own right. As such, this occasionally witty, often moving, always thought-provoking book stands as a reaffirmation of the very energy of life itself.