Clutch

“White Lotus with more sincerity and heart.” —Los Angeles Times

A close-knit group of women navigate mid-life’s biggest challenges—marriage, career, addiction—in this “sharp, funny, utterly engrossing” novel (Lynn Steger Strong)

Named a Best Book by The New York Times Book Review, People, Los Angeles Times, Alta Journal, Bustle, and more

Five friends, twenty years, one reunion trip.

As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.

The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue reunion: Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary's medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband's struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she's never met.

Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.A New York Times Editors' Choice

“I rooted for these women, loved them, and cherished the omniscient asides sprinkled throughout hinting at happy endings, even far beyond the novel. . . . What I wouldn’t give to know that my friends and I will end up OK, to have someone with Nemens’s feral intelligence mapping our paths.” —Joumana Khatib, The New York Times

“For fans of Elena Ferrante and stories about complex female friendships, Clutch is a must-read.” —Bustle, A Best Book of February

“Through miscarriages, divorces, deaths and loneliness, these largely ambitious and successful women protect each other like lionesses, providing a kind of support that their families and partners just can’t. . . . There’s something universal and lovely about the way Clutch portrays the crucial and deep love that only friendship can provide.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Funny, tender, and undeniably entertaining.” —Chicago Review of Books, A Must-Read Book of February

“Lovely . . . Powerful.” —NPR, All Things Considered

“Nemens asks what each of us owes our most treasured friendships, long after the height of the relationship.” —Alta Journal, A Best Book of February

“[With] richness of character, language & metaphor . . . refreshingly refuses any neat wrap-ups or easy victimization despite betrayal.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Perfectly captures the nature of female friends: in loyalty and love, dissonance and imperfection.” —The Center for Fiction

“A big, beautiful novel about what friendship means as we get older.” —LitHub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2026

“What I really like about this book is that none of the five women feel overly like stereotypes or even archetypes . . . for these friends, even when things go catastrophically wrong, you feel comforted. It’s a real pleasure to settle in to read.” —The New York Times Book Review Podcast, A Most Anticipated Book of Winter

“An assured and wise book, unique in how seriously it takes the value of friendship between older women.” —Electric Literature

“Shines a light on what adult friendship and community between women really aspires to be.” —The Rumpus

“An authentic chronicle of midlife female friendship . . . Funny, sometimes piercing and sometimes poignant, but never sentimental—the ideal read for anyone who cringes at Galentine’s Day, yet knows that no romance has shaped them more profoundly than the one they share with their oldest friends.” —Tertulia

“Centers wit, joy, and laughter alongside the sorrows and frustrations of midlife, reaffirming the importance of deep and abiding friendships.” —BookPage

“Impressive. . . . [a] gut-punch climax, rewarding the reader who’s paying attention to all the details.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Engaging. . . . The draw here is spending time with these friends, whose complex lives Nemens cannily and sometimes heartrendingly portrays as they go through so much, together and alone.”—Booklist

“Nemens captures the complexity of maintaining friendships while reckoning with the challenges of middle age. It adds up to a chatty and sometimes insightful riff on The Big Chill.”—Publishers Weekly

“What happens when youthful dreams and ambitions hit the wall? Emily Nemens’s compelling new novel, Clutch, is an exploration of long devoted friendships in such pivotal moments. The life-changing situations and choices leave us aware of both a universal experience and the most private and fragile one. Wise, witty and at times harrowing, Nemens skillfully weaves the lives of these five friends, memorably cemented by time.” —Jill McCorkle, bestselling author of Life After Life

“Clutch is a sharp, heartfelt celebration of modern friendship, positioning it as the backbone of our social lives. Through bold, inventive leaps, Nemens’s prose dazzles, elevating the group chat, and the friend bond, to something sacred and vital. A big-hearted and daring novel from one of our finest creative and critical minds.” —Jonathan Escoffery, award-winning author of If I Survive You

“Finally, we have a collective noun for a group of aging female friends, and only the great Emily Nemens could've declared it. Clutch is hilarious, philosophical, anthropological, polyphonic, with a keen eye for the specific foibles of our present American moment. Nemens is an expert chronicler of the subtle ways women wound each other, and also, the ways they offer love. The way a friendship can carry venom and antidote both. These pages made me laugh and broke my heart—yes, it had me in its clutches.” —Hilary Leichter, award-winning author of Terrace Story

“A sharp, funny, utterly engrossing exploration of the enduring complexity and deep love of long term friendship, Clutch enmeshes you in the particularities, yearning, fears of these five friends, as they try and fail and try again to love and care for one another amidst the endless push and pull, losses and joys of middle life.” —Lynn Steger Strong, author of The Float Test

“Clutch is a powerfully intimate portrait of female friendship, following five college friends through the turbulent landscape of their forties as careers implode, marriages fracture, and dreams reshape themselves in unexpected ways. With razor-sharp insight, humor, and deep compassion, Nemens explores how these women navigate life's most challenging moments, proving that even when circumstances threaten to tear them apart, the bonds forged in youth can become the foundation for reinvention. This is a bracingly honest and exhilarating novel about the messy, complicated, and essential work of showing up for the people who matter most.” —Kimberly King Parsons, award-winning author of We Were the Universe

“Witty, incisive, and gorgeously written. . . . The five women in this book, so lovingly portrayed in all their imperfect glory, will step off the page and into your heart.” —Ana Reyes, author of The House in the PinesEmily Nemens’s debut novel, The Cactus League, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Emily spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as co-editor and prose editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022-23 Picador Professorship (University of Leipzig) and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.