It starts with Pru and Spence’s meeting and blooming love story at the university.

Such a great novel: Easy to read, easy to connect with the characters and understand things from their POVs. Poignant, well analyzed, realistically written bittersweet story with its well developed, layered middle class New Yorker characters. It's about the love between women and men and children and parents, about the things we give up in the face of adversity, about what endures when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for. Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father's last, best hope. Meanwhile, Spence's estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. One day, feeling particularly isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. With their daughter Sarah away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own. The Great Man can't concentrate he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. But when she falls in love with Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn't have anticipated.

When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976 after graduating from Yale, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. A tender, powerful, and big-hearted novel about love in the face of loss, from the award-winning author of The World Without You and Matrimony

Morningside Heights by Joshua Henkin