Betsy Lewis is an innocent abroad until she meets Alice Blanders Russo and her much younger lover, Leo Conti. Together they form a triangle of friendship and desire that will turn Betsy’s marriage--and her principles--upside down. Add a hilarious excursion to find her Italian "roots” and the rediscovery of an old friend (brilliant, black and gay), and Betsy is on a road to self-discovery filled with unexpected turnings and definitely dangerous curves. Alive with the attractions and contradictions of Rome and the Americans who gathered there in the '60’s and '70’s, Friends Along the Way explores serious relationships with just the right touch of wild humor, capturing the flavor of love Italian style--rich, robust, and a feast to remember. Julia Markus, an English professor at Hofstra University, received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for her first novel, Uncle, which was followed by three well-received novels, American Rose, Friends Along the Way and A Change of Luck, as well as her critically acclaimed biographies, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and Across An Untried Sea: Discovering Lives Hidden in the Shadow of Convention and Time. She has won a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two National Endowment for the Humanities grants. Her most recent book is J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian. "An entire generation’s rite of passage.” --Philadelphia Inquirer ”Tracing the ties that bind and the ties that unravel.” --Chicago Sun Times "A Book one wants to keep on reading.” --New York Time Book Review "Deeply engaging...opens up wonderful new angles onto fiction’s familiar landscape of passion and the search for self” --Newsweek