Nancy Hale

Set in Boston, New York, and Virginia, The Prodigal Women tells the intertwined stories of three young women who come of age in the Roaring Twenties, not flappers and golden girls but flesh-and-blood female protagonists looking wearily—and warily—at the paths open to women in a rapidly changing world. Leda March, “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire,” is the daughter of poorer relations of a prominent Boston family...