The Last Girls — Lee Smith

IT SEEMS A LIFETIME AGO that twelve young coeds from a Blue Ridge women's college set off on a grand adventure down the Mississippi on a raft, Huck Finn-style. In fact, it was 1965, and now four of those women have reunited on the banks of the great river once again. There's Harriet, ever sensible and never married; proper Courtney, whose life seems ripped from the pages of Southern Living; flamboyant Anna, a romance writer; and artist Catherine, whose "happy" marriage is actually rather confining. Separately, these women have grown, but together they will venture down the Mississippi once more -- this time in comparative luxury, aboard a riverboat -- and try to come to terms with their shared past by the time they reach New Orleans, where they will say a final, heartfelt goodbye to one of their own.