In Plainview, Indiana, three friends who have met every Sunday for more than forty years at the same table in Earl's All-You-Can-Eat — the first Black-owned business in the downtown — are known, as they have been since high school in the 1960s, as the Supremes. Odette, the fearless narrator, born in a sycamore tree and unafraid of anything, is facing cancer while her late mother visits her in the company of famous ghosts. Clarice, proud and musically gifted, is holding her marriage together in public while her husband Richmond's infidelities humiliate her in private. Barbara Jean, who married for money after losing the love of her youth, drinks against the memory of that affair and of her dead son. Moore, a professional cellist writing his first novel, moves between their present-tense crises and the decades that made them, filling the diner booth with gossip, church life, marriages, funerals and second chances. Warm, funny and unsentimental in equal measure, the novel is a sustained tribute to the durability of women's friendship, and it later inspired the film The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat.
Author: Edward Kelsey Moore · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 2013
