*A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice*
From the award-winning author Lynn Freed, whoโs been called a โliterary starโ by The New York Times Book Review, comes a hilarious and brilliant new novel about the riotous, passion-filled adventures of three women who thought they were past their prime.
To escape their griping grown children, husbands and lovers, and an abundance of grandchildren underfoot, three self-proclaimed โold bags,โ Dania, Ruth, and Bess, head for a quiet island on the Aegean Sea. Theyโll spend a year by the waterโwatching the sunset, eating grilled fish and fresh olives, sipping ouzo. They deserve it, they say. After all those years, the three women will finally have some peace.
Except that they canโt. For one, Bess, a pampered, once-beautiful inheritress, falls swiftly into an affair with a poetry-writing taxi driverโwho has, of course, a territorial wife. And Dania, a therapist, begins to receive an increasing number of cryptically menacing phone calls from a psychotic patient. An ex-lover of Ruthโs shows up unexpectedly, right before one of Bessโs doesโand then the womenโs children arrive, with their own demanding children in tow. As the island quickly becomes crowded, the womenโs serene year in Greece devolves perilously, and uproariously, into something much more complicated.
With the wit of Maria Sempleโs Today Will Be Different and all the adventure of Deborah Moggachโs The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Lynn Freedโs The Last Laugh is at once wildly funny and deeply perceptive, an exuberant story of friendship and pleasure, family and love.