The Others Gold

Lainey, Margaret, Alice, and Ji Sun arrive at a small liberal arts college in upstate New York and end up sharing a high-ceilinged suite in an old dormitory called the Penthouse. Across four years they become inseparable, the kind of friends who seem to other students like a single luminous unit, and across the four years that follow they remain so, even as careers and city apartments and adult problems start pulling at the seams. Each of the novel's four sections is told from the perspective of one of the women and centers on a single irrevocable transgression, an act each woman commits or carries that the others must decide how to forgive. Elizabeth Ames's debut, published in 2020, is a quietly observant novel about female friendship, privilege, and the way the secrets we keep for one another shape the shape of our lives.