Laura & Emma

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Synopsis

“Masterly deftness, funny sentence by funny sentence...a moving and intricately braided story of two mothers.” Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian

This “beguiling, addictive read” (People, Book of the Week) and Belletrist Book Club pick about a blue-blooded single mother raising her daughter in rarefied New York City is a “carefully observed family story [that] rings true to life” (The New York Times Book Review).

Laura hails from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, born into old money, drifting aimlessly into her early thirties. One weekend in 1981 she meets a man. The two sleep together. He vanishes. And Laura realizes she’s pregnant.

Enter: Emma.

“Unputdownable” (Library Journal) and “wryly observed” (Vogue), Laura & Emma follows Laura as she raises Emma in New York City over the next fifteen years. With wit and compassion, Kate Greathead explores the many flaws and quirks that make us human. Laura’s story hosts a cast of effervescent and original characters, including her eccentric mother, who informs her society friends and Emma herself that she was fathered by a Swedish sperm donor; her brother, whose childhood stutter reappears in the presence of their forbidding father; an exceptionally kind male pediatrician; and her overbearing best friend, whose life has followed the Park Avenue script in every way except for childbearing.

“Kate Greathead’s debut novel gamely takes on class conflict, single motherhood, and the discreet pretension of the 1980s Upper East Side” (New York magazine) and is a “layered story about mothers and daughters and identity” (Entertainment Weekly). Told in vignettes whose every “restrained and understated sentence has been polished to glittering brightness” (Vox), Laura & Emma is “an incisive comedy of manners about class divides and the ‘burdens’ of being born privileged” (Esquire) and “a thoughtful novel of trying to find oneself despite an assigned place in the world” (Publishers Weekly).

Chapters

  • LauraAndEmma 01 Open

    Duration: 12s
  • LauraAndEmma 02 1980

    Duration: 15min
  • LauraAndEmma 03 1981

    Duration: 49min
  • LauraAndEmma 04 1982

    Duration: 20min
  • LauraAndEmma 05 1983

    Duration: 01min
  • LauraAndEmma 06 1984

    Duration: 03min
  • LauraAndEmma 07 1985

    Duration: 07min
  • LauraAndEmma 08 1986

    Duration: 21min
  • LauraAndEmma 09 1987

    Duration: 35min
  • LauraAndEmma 10 1988

    Duration: 01h12s
  • LauraAndEmma 11 1989

    Duration: 54min
  • LauraAndEmma 12 1990

    Duration: 01h01min
  • LauraAndEmma 13 1991

    Duration: 41min
  • LauraAndEmma 14 1992

    Duration: 54s
  • LauraAndEmma 15 1993

    Duration: 05min
  • LauraAndEmma 16 1994

    Duration: 35min
  • LauraAndEmma 17 1995

    Duration: 01h29min
  • LauraAndEmma 18 Close

    Duration: 21s