Friends Along the Way — Julia Markus

Betsy Lewis is an innocent abroad until she meets Alice Blanders Russo and her much younger lover, Leo Conti. Together they form a triangle of friendship and desire that will turn Betsy's marriage� -- and her principles� -- upside down. Add a hilarious excursion to find her Italian �"roots” and the rediscovery of an old friend (brilliant, black and gay), and Betsy is on a road to self-discovery filled with unexpected turnings and definitely dangerous curves. Alive with the attractions and contradictions of Rome and the Americans who gathered there in the �'60's and �'70's, Friends Along the Way explores serious relationships with just the right touch of wild humor, capturing the flavor of love Italian style� -- rich, robust, and a feast to remember.

Julia Markus, an English professor at Hofstra University, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first novel, Uncle, which was followed by three well-received novels, American Rose, Friends Along the Way and A Change of Luck, as well as her critically acclaimed biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her most recent book is J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian.

�"An entire generation's rite of passage.”
-- Philadelphia Inquirer

”Tracing the ties that bind and the ties that unravel.”
-- Chicago Sun Times

�"A Book one wants to keep on reading.”
-- New York Time Book Review

�"Deeply engaging�...opens up wonderful new angles onto fiction's familiar landscape of passion and the search for self”
-- Newsweek