Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Feb 2024
352 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Two women test how much weight their friendship can hold in this poignant and tender novel.
Roommates since college, Jess and Ren have built a strong—if at times codependent—friendship. Now navigating their late thirties, the women co-own a weathered beachfront home, comother a rescued shelter pup and have inadvertently centered their lives around each other.
Jess is clever and driven with a lucrative career running her own real estate brokerage. Magnetic but aimless, Ren has been making margaritas at the same local dive and teaching dance classes at the same run-down gym for well over a decade. After a one-night stand with a tourist leads to pregnancy, Ren realizes motherhood may be the change she's been waiting for, and the friends make a plan to raise the child together.
Ren is excitedly pushing toward her due date when the baby's father resurfaces, forcing Jess to face the foreboding notion that for the first time in eighteen years, they may not want the same thing.
In this stunning debut spanning nine pivotal months in the lives of two very different women, Zoë Eisenberg examines female friendship with emotional precision and offers an intimate look at who we belong to—and why.
"This accomplished first novel artfully limns romantic cross-currents in a thoroughly contemporary setting."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Eisenberg offers a well-honed glimpse at an unconventional family and the obstacles to growing up."
—Publishers Weekly
"Significant Others is so intimately raw and hopeful, I couldn't put it down and when I finally did, because I'd finished it, I had literal goosebumps. To write this way about families and friendships made and remade, about the push and pull of love and the way we're all just crazy puzzle pieces floating around, trying to understand what the whole picture might look like and how beautiful it might be—amazing."
—Catherine Newman, author of We All Want Impossible Things
"Deeply touching and keenly observed, Significant Others explores the beauty and complexity of female friendship, and what it means to build yourself a home with chosen family. Eisenberg offers a window into the lives of two women as their shared world completely shifts on its axis, writing with the kind of attention and care that makes it truly unputdownable. I found the setting to be as rich and vivid as the characters themselves. I read it in one sitting."
—Amanda Pellegrino, author of The Social Climber
"Zoe Eisenberg's engrossing novel delves into the lives of two friends whose bond is as committed and complicated as any romantic partnership. A keen observer of our tangled inner worlds and relationship dynamics, Eisenberg reveals how we misunderstand the people we think we know best—including ourselves. Significant Others is a testament to the relationships that defy easy labels yet leave an indelible mark on our lives."
—Rhaina Cohen, author of The Other Significant Others
"Zoe Eisenberg's Significant Others is a heart-felt journey set against the backdrop of the Big Island of Hawai'i. Through the distinct voices of life-long besties Jess and Ren, Eisenberg explores female friendship in all its intensity, heartbreak, tenderness, and expansive love. I can't wait to gift this book to my own significant others!"
—Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This Is Paradise
This information about Significant Others was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Zoë Eisenberg is a writer, filmmaker and circus producer based out of Kalapana, Hawai'i. She holds a BA in creative writing. This is her first novel.
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