The Weekend Wives' Club - by Elise Chidley (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In the honeyed hills of the Cotswolds, six residents of Laingtree village form an unlikely alliance: the Weekend Wives' Club. Their common thread? Each is married to someone who lives and works in London during the week, leaving them effectively single Monday through Friday.

Isabel is quietly taking measures to avoid a third child while convincing her husband that she's trying for a baby. Jack, the group's only man, is essentially raising a toddler alone while freelancing from home. Abby, a gifted dressmaker, suspects her husband's London job comes with a lover. Flora is fixated on turning her young daughter into an Olympic gymnast, no matter the cost. Lisa is trying not to leave home wearing her pajamas. Only Mel seems to be holding it all together. When Abby decides to launch a clothing line for older women, the club bands together to help her stage a catwalk show in a local barn, modeling the clothes themselves. What starts out as a bold and glamorous distraction from their private troubles ends in the tragedy of one of the husbands... dead.

So who killed him--and why? The story rewinds, peeling back layers of friendship, jealousy, deception, and desire that lead to the fatal moment as tensions mount, secrets fester, and relationships begin to fracture. When the unthinkable happens, the Weekend Wives close ranks in an unspoken pact: some truths are better left untold, especially when one of their own may be guilty. Told from multiple perspectives with a "rom com" voice, The Weekend Wives is a domestic thriller about the masks we wear in public, the quiet resentments that bloom behind closed doors, and how far people will go to protect their friends, their reputations, and themselves.

About the Author

Elise Chidley was born in eSwatini and went to school and university in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Her first novel, Your Roots Are Showing (published by Grand Central, and by Orion in the UK as The Wrong Sort of Wife), was nominated for Best First Book and Best Single Title Contemporary Romance at the RITA Awards. She received her MFA from Penn State and now lives in Connecticut, teaching creative writing at The Westport Writers' Workshop.