Alice Adams Books in Order

Newly divorced Daisy Duke Fabbri seeks love among San Francisco's artists and fashionable social circles. Her passionate affair with a Spanish aristocrat complicates her efforts to rebuild her life and exposes the limits of romantic expectations.

Louisa Calloway looks back on her Southern upbringing, marriages, and resistance to her father's conservative expectations. Her changing relationships form a search for independence and a clearer understanding of the woman she wants to become.

Sixteen stories explore love in its shifting moods, following the emotional complications of people drawn toward or away from one another. Across varied situations, intimacy brings moments of recognition alongside uncertainty about what another person feels.

Fleeing an unhappy Boston romance, Daphne Matthiessen stays with an old school friend in San Francisco. Becoming involved in her friend's family and social world draws Daphne toward unresolved memories and the possibility of recovering lost love.

A grieving wife searches for her husband’s missing diaries, a teacher finds herself attracted to a student, and an artist reassesses her achievements. These stories follow people whose relationships unsettle their understanding of their own lives.

A group of young women navigate friendship, romance, and ambition across four decades, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Their intertwined lives reveal how changing circumstances test loyalty and reshape the support they find in one another.

Travelers seek friendship, cultural discovery, and a fresh sense of possibility, while returning home brings encounters with unfinished histories. These stories examine how unfamiliar places and remembered ones reshape what people understand about their lives.

Young Jane Kilgore moves to North Carolina with her superstitious mother and finds stability in Harriet Farr's family. As her life carries her elsewhere, their friendship continues to shape her understanding of childhood and belonging.

Longtime friends in a California community face troubled marriages, bereavement, uncertain romances, and carefully guarded secrets. Their intertwined stories explore whether years of shared experience can help them survive disappointment and build different futures.

The loss or departure of a lover, spouse, parent, or friend leaves the people in these stories facing altered lives. Their efforts to adjust reveal the emotional ties that continue after a relationship has changed.

Adams recounts her enduring fascination with Mexico through observations of its landscapes, people, art, and cities. Visits to Mayan ruins and reflections on Mexico City's hardships form a personal account of travel and cultural encounter.

Richard Fallon and Stella Blake appear to have an ideal relationship in 1980s San Francisco. As Richard's increasingly erratic behavior undermines their life together, Stella confronts the widening gap between romantic appearances and painful reality.

In 1939, Harry and Cynthia Baird move with their daughter from Connecticut to Pinehill, North Carolina, hoping for renewal. The town's complicated social life and approaching war unsettle their dream of a simpler existence.

Molly Brenner struggles with guilt after her husband's accidental death and initially dismisses her headaches as emotional. A cancer diagnosis forces her to depend on doctors she distrusts and reconsider her resistance to accepting help.

These stories move through San Francisco, a North Carolina college town, and a faded Mexican resort. Four linked stories about a divorced psychiatrist close the collection, extending its attention to the relationships shaping individual lives.

With Harry Baird working in wartime London, Cynthia faces loneliness and growing awareness of prejudice in Pinehill. Their daughter Abigail's departure for college adds another transition as the family confronts an America altered by war.

Fifty-three stories selected from five earlier collections trace the emotional lives of people navigating love and their perceptions of others. This posthumous volume brings together encounters in which ordinary relationships expose uncertainty, longing, and unexpected recognition.

Caroline's five adult daughters follow sharply different paths through marriage, motherhood, careers, and uncertainty. Watching their struggles from an increasing distance, she confronts the limits of parental protection and the complicated bonds holding their family together.

Eliza Hamilton Quarles enters marriage as a boarding-school girl captivated by an older man. Twenty years later, divorced and raising a child, she explores new relationships and interests while trying to establish a more independent identity.