WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Five 40-something Harvard alumnae are forced to confront the consequences of the dangerous tradition they started as students.

The Circus is a yearly tag-and-kill game narrator Sara and her former roommates Allie, Bee, Dina, and Wesley began while undergraduates. The game has kept them “tether[ed]” to each other for 20 years, but it’s also kept them connected to the memory of Claudine, the artist roommate who died during their traumatic senior-year playing of the game. When the story begins, Sara sees a woman resembling Claudine on the streets of New York. Haunted by the sighting, she decides to opt out of the 20th anniversary playing of the Circus until the women get together and Wesley tells them about the money—a few thousand dollars they had chipped in decades earlier to be given to the winner of the final contest has grown to nearly $1 million. With consummate skill and acuity, Lee explores the complicated relationships among the five main characters, and all their dreams. Sara, a former banker and struggling photographer, longs for a place in the art world Claudine once dreamed of inhabiting. Her closest friend, Dina, is on the verge of tenure at Harvard after years of unspoken struggle. Bee, a lawyer, seeks political office but is dogged by a smear campaign launched by Claudine’s mother. Wesley, though born to wealth, secretly hates both her controlling father and her profession and leans “on drink and drugs to make her feel sated.” And Allie, a busy working mother of three and the group’s unofficial “peacemaker,” bears a quiet exhaustion she refuses to acknowledge. Each equates Circus prize money with freedom, but when one of them is attacked and nearly killed, secrets begin to emerge that change everything they believed about themselves and the ones they love. Fast paced and tightly plotted, Lee’s novel explores the complexities of female friendships against a quietly unsettling backdrop of privilege and ambition.

An immersive novel that delivers suspense with style and intelligence.