“Wise, witty, and at times harrowing, Nemens skillfully weaves the lives of five friends, memorably cemented by time.”
- Jill McCorkle
Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five women, friends for twenty years, as they go through the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?
ISBN
9781963108668
Language
English
Page count
400
Dimensions
5-1/2 x 8-1/2
About the Book
As undergrads, Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.
The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue reunion: Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary’s medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband’s struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she’s never met.
Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.
“Clutch is a sharp, heartfelt celebration of modern friendship, positioning it as the backbone of our social lives. A big-hearted and daring novel from one of our finest creative and critical minds.”
—Jonathan Escoffery
“Nemens is an expert chronicler of the subtle ways women wound each other, and also, the ways they offer love. The way a friendship can carry venom and antidote both. These pages made me laugh and broke my heart—yes, it had me in its clutches.”
—Hilary Leichter
“A sharp, funny, utterly engrossing exploration of the enduring complexity and deep love of long-term friendship, Clutch enmeshes you in the particularities, yearning, fears of these five friends, as they try and fail and try again to love and care for one another amidst the endless push and pull, losses and joys of middle life.”
—Lynn Steger Strong
“With razor-sharp insight, humor, and deep compassion, Nemens explores how these women navigate life’s most challenging moments, proving that even when circumstances threaten to tear them apart, the bonds forged in youth can become the foundation for reinvention. A bracingly honest and exhilarating novel about the messy, complicated, and essential work of showing up for the people who matter most.”
—Kimberly King Parsons
Emily Nemens
Emily Nemens’ debut novel The Cactus League, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Emily spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as co-editor and prose editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022-23 Picador Professorship (University of Leipzig) and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.
