“Beautifully written, a highly literate story of friendship, parenthood, and every other kind of love you can imagine.” —Marisa de los Santos, author of Love Walked In When Jill becomes both pregnant and single at the end of one spring semester, she and her two closest friends plunge into an experiment in tri-parenting, tri-schooling, and trihabitating as grad students in Seattle. Naturally, everything goes wrong, but in ways no one sees coming. Janey Duncan narrates the adventure of this modern family with hilarity and wisdom and shows how three lives are forever changed by (un)cooperative parenting, literature, and a tiny baby named Atlas who upends and uplifts their entire world. In this sparkling and wise debut novel, Frankel’s unforgettable heroines prove that home is simply where the love is. First-novelist Frankel mashes together a number of themes familiar to readers of women’s fiction—though not quite in the way they’re combined here—sprinkling the whole with liberal doses of low-key humor. Canadian Janey, Mormon Katie, and vegetarian Jill all become good friends while attending graduate school in Seattle. Although they share a love of literature—they’re English-lit students—they are quite different in their approaches to life and love. Then Jill becomes pregnant by her much younger boyfriend, who decides he cannot handle the burdens of parenthood. Both Janey and Katie immediately volunteer to move in with her and help her raise her child. Janey, especially, falls in love with the baby they name Atlas, and they begin the herculean task of juggling their schedules between teaching, studying, and child care. A medical emergency involving Atlas, though, soon tests their idealistic arrangement in unforeseen ways. Frankel proves insightful on the topic of friendship, incorporates a foodie’s love of cooking, and overly idealizes a few of the characters; but this is a feel-good novel, after all, and ultimately a celebration of modern family life and the myriad forms it can take. --Joanne Wilkinson "Frankel's debut is a wonderful literary treat that offers a fresh twist on the modern family, one that relies on the bonds of women." -- Library Journal (starred) "This beautifully written debut novel offers something for everyone—humor, richly drawn characters and a tender exploration of love, friendship and food."-- LA Times Magazine "It’s been a long time since I’ve been as charmed by a book as I was by this beautifully written, highly literate story of friendship, parenthood, and every other kind of love you can imagine. I was captivated by Janey, a narrator whose wit and generous spirit caused me to forget that she wasn’t a flesh and blood person—and to wish that she were.” --Marisa de los Santos, author of Love Walked In and Belong to Me “Packed full of hilarious and insightful observations on life, love, and literature,  The Atlas of Love deftly explores the boundaries of friendship and family, and the true meaning of motherhood.” --J. Courtney Sullivan, author of Commencement “Immensely likable, playful and literary, this is a novel full of love." --Cathleen Schine, author of The Three Weissmanns of Westport " The Atlas of Love is an engagingly funny novel with a memorable premise—three women graduate students from very different backgrounds team up to raise a child—that deepens into a moving and challenging meditation on the power and the limits of female friendship. Laurie Frankel writes with a light touch and a keen eye for detail, blending academic comedy and domestic drama with unusual skill.” --Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children and The Abstinence Teacher “Once in a great while, a book is so beautifully written that when you close it, all you can do is sit quietly and hold it to your chest.  Laurie Frankel's The Atlas of Love is that book.” --Sandra Kring, author of The Book of Bright Ideas and Thank You For All Things   Laurie Frankel lives in Seattle and teaches in the English Department at the University of Puget Sound. This is her first novel. One WHEN I WAS six years old, I found a baby in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. Wound in a sheet and nestled among the roots of a veritable island of overgrown potted jungle in the corner, it was exactly where no one but a six-year-old would look. You wouldn’t go back there unless you were obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are and knew a forest hung with vines when you saw one and your grandmother was taking forever to check in and wasn’t paying any attention to you anyway. Or unless you were a twenty-year-old front desk clerk, secretly pregnant and scared to death, who had just given birth on your lunch break in a third-floor suite which you knew wouldn’t be occupied all week because its carpet was being replaced. Then that potted jungle might look pretty good to you. I had slipped stealthily away from my grandmother and wandered bravely into that forest in search of wild things. There, I found mostly dust, one heads-u