Take What You Can

Take What You Can is so brilliantly, unbelievably good I have a burning in my heart from gulping it down too fast. It is somehow both taut and expansive—a literary feat I don't understand—and it's about the pleasure, grief, and devotion of daughters, mothers, lovers, wives. But mostly it's about the coming together and coming apart of a singular epic friendship between two women. Love is utterly bewildering, and nobody writes about it better than Naima Coster.

Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and Wreck

Val and Milly fell in love with France at the same time they fell in love with each other, bonding as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip. Now, they are in their thirties, each married and with a baby girl on the way. When Milly suggests Val move to New York to raise their daughters together after a decade apart, it's a resounding yes.

However, Val and Milly are no longer the girls they once were. Milly is a successful influencer married to restaurant royalty, and Val is a brilliant journalist, struggling to write her first book and fit into her old friend's new world. The realities of class and social capital, of strained marriages and the demands of motherhood, serve as constant reminders of how far apart they've grown.

No matter how much they try to avoid it, everything comes back to a rift that began all those years ago in France. What they've long tried to bury may finally destroy their sisterhood...

"A magnificent book of emotional precision and startling insight, as awake to beauty and light as it is unafraid of the shadows, Take What You Can had me spellbound as I tore through it."

Megha Majumdar, National Book Award finalist for A Guardian and a Thief and bestselling author of A Burning

'Long after reading the last page of Naima Coster's latest exploration of love, I still feel Milly and Val pulsing through my soul. Their story of a shaky friendship amid the disorienting chaos of new motherhood made me feel seen, understood, and literally breathless, gasping at the precise, sophisticated ways these women know how to cut each other, then doctor the wounds. Take What You Can is the kind of novel you'll be hungry to share with your own friends, debating who's right, who's wrong, and who could use a hug the most.'

Dawnie Walton, Women's Prize longlisted author of The Final Revival of Opal and Nev