The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why. Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously. Two college students and lifelong friends are vacationing in Greece in the 1980s. This is just one in a string of adventures for sexy, confident Nix, but for Mary it’s a radical departure from the sheltered life overseen by her adoptive parents to keep her cystic fibrosis in check. Three years later, Mary is in London, grieving for Nix, whose fate remains a mystery for much of the novel. Mary lives on the edge, exacerbating her chronic illness, which Frangello (Slut Lullabies, 2010) depicts with unnervingly clinical specificity. She falls in love with a South African gymnast, and they travel the world. Frangello describes each setting with elegiac intensity, assembles a six-degrees-of-separation cast of characters lanced by secrets and pain, and embroiders a suspenseful, melodramatic, wildly excessive plot of interconnectivity, embodying Mary’s desperate attempt to fill her numbered days to the brim. In this bravura performance, a quantum creative leap, contrivances and all, Frangello astutely dissects the quandaries of female sexuality, adoption, terminal illness, and compound heartbreak in a torrent of tough-minded observations, audacious candor, and storytelling moxie. --Donna Seaman Deeply human, darkly funny, seriously sexy. * The friendship between Mary and Nix had endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women embarked on a summer vacation in Greece. It was a trip initiated by Nix, who had just learned that Mary had been diagnosed with a disease that would cut her life short and who was determined that it be the vacation of a lifetime. But by the time their visit to Greece was over, Nix had withdrawn from their friendship, and Mary had no idea why. Three years later, Nix is dead, and Mary returns to Europe to try to understand what went wrong. In the process she meets the first of many men that she will spend time with as she travels throughout the world. Through them she experiences not only a sexual awakening but a spiritual and emotional awakening that allows her to understand how the past and the future are connected and to appreciate the freedom to live life adventurously. Frangello illuminates the ways in which life itself is an illusion, but a grand and beautiful and heartbreaking and brilliant one. A book about the deepest kind of love, A Life in Men asks (and answers) these questions: How would you live if you had limited time? And with whom would you spend it? *Emily Rapp, author of The Still Point of the Turning World A Life in Men is a joyful, ambitious novel that is also an adventure traversing three continents, as well as a meditation on love, sex, and, most important, friendship, which can overcome time, distance, and even death. Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Once Upon a River A Life in Men is a vivid, devastating, and ferocious novel that captures a woman s whole life in a world torn apart by terrorism and alienation . . . A story of love, passion, and friendship that will rock readers to the core. Patrick Somerville, author of The Cradle and This Bright River Gina Frangello delivers truth in the form of brave, purposeful, masterful prose. The emotional lives of her characters are as complex as those of any breathing human, nuanced, sharp, and fully real. Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much