Inspired by true events and her own family history, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff tells a sweeping story of missing husbands, buried secrets, and the women who come together to reclaim their power
“You want to place an ad for your missing husband?”
New York, 1919. After grief and scandal shatter her carefully ordered world, Hazel Brister leaves her privileged upbringing behind for a new life on the Lower East Side. Working at a small newspaper, she is trying to build a future from the wreckage of her past. But when a woman named Freyda arrives asking for help finding her vanished husband, Hazel is pulled into a mystery she never expected.
Hazel discovers there are a number of women who share Freyda’s bizarre predicament, left to support children, survive disgrace, and piece together lives suddenly upended. She agrees to help them, in hopes of discovering the truth behind the missing husbands and writing the newspaper story about it that will launch her long-forgotten dream of becoming a journalist. Determined to uncover the truth, Hazel joins forces with an unlikely circle of sharp-witted, resourceful women, following a trail of secrets through the streets of New York to cities beyond. But their searches are blocked at every turn by cryptic secrets from the past and dark forces who want to stop them from finding the answers they seek.
As Hazel digs deeper, she realizes the mystery reaches far closer to home than she ever imagined, forcing her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about her family—and herself. What begins as a search for the missing men grows into something far greater: a testament to the lives women can build when they refuse to be defined by others. Inspired by extraordinary true events, The Society of Forgotten Wives is a transporting story of female solidarity, survival, and reclaiming one’s own destiny.
