Bye, Baby

New Yorker Billie has never wanted children. But the series of hurts chronicled over the course of this frenemies story find her standing in the apartment below her former best friend, Cassie’s, place, holding Cassie’s baby while her friend upstairs wails that there’s been a kidnapping. Most of this absorbing tale takes place in the present, when lonely Billie tries over and over to regain the closeness she had with Cassie when they were teens. But Cassie, who’s now a famous Instagram mommy, wants little to do with her. We also flash back to those teen years, when a incident involving Billie’s stepfather, whose sexual abuse of the girl is graphically described, has been kept a secret by Billie and Cassie, leaving them emotionally tied but perhaps also causing their estrangement. As in her Can’t Look Away (2022), Lovering nails the bizarreness of obsessive love—Billie’s for Cassie and Cassie’s for Internet fame—and its twisted outcomes. This book will be a hit with fans of that previous work as well as of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love.