Laurie

We meet Marlie Davidow, home alone with her new baby late one Friday night, when she wanders onto her ex's online wedding registry and wonders what if she had wound up with the guy not taken. We stumble upon Good in Bed's Bruce Guberman, liquored-up and ready for anything on the night of his best friend's bachelor party, until stealing his girlfriend's tiny rat terrier becomes more complicated than he'd planned.

Elinor Mackey has always done the right things in the right order: college, law school, career, marriage. But now everything's going wrong. After two painful years of trying, Elinor has learned that she can't have children. All the doctors can tell her is that it's probably because of her age. As she turns 40, she withdraws into an interior world of heartbreak.

The surprise hit of the year, Allison Pearson's debut novel is garnering critical and fan raves. Publishers Weekly calls I Don't Know How She Does It "delightfully fast moving...with dozens of laugh-aloud moments and many tenderly touching ones," and Booklist applauds this "compelling manifesto on the plight of working mothers that manages to be both angry and funny."