"When Lilly Dancyger was twenty-three years old, her best friend and cousin, Sabina, was violently raped and murdered. In the face of devastating loss, Dancyger stayed sane and whole by the magic and the medicine of her female friends. Each essay in First Love examines a different female friendship in her life, beginning with her first love-Sabina-whose loss becomes the springboard for Dancyger's examinations of her fierce and passionate relationships...

An unlikely friendship develops when Stephen takes in an abandoned alien as his guest.

Ameena feels invisible in her all-white class, but she soon finds friendship and community with a new Muslim student.

"Washington, DC, 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation's capital where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic room, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss, whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; policeman's...