Delia Winslow spent nineteen years as a hospice social worker, which is a job that teaches you two things very quickly: that almost nobody’s last conversations are with the people they married, and that the friendships women build in their twenties are frequently the load-bearing walls of their entire lives. She started writing fiction because she kept meeting women at the end who wanted to talk about a girl they had shared a flat with in 1987, and she could not stop thinking about them.

Raised in Providence, Rhode Island, the middle of three daughters in a loud house where the kitchen table was the only real furniture, Delia has always been more interested in how people hold each other than in how they fall in love. Her novels are built on a conviction she formed at a lot of bedsides: that most of the damage between people who love each other is done kindly, by well-meant omissions that harden over decades into something nobody can dismantle alone.

Her Marrow Street Women novels follow four friends who met in a rented house in their twenties, returning to them at a different hinge of life in each book – a house sale, a funeral, a diagnosis – and opening one more thing they agreed not to discuss. Readers can expect four women who are each right and each wrong, a secret that is smaller and sadder than the versions they have tormented themselves with, warmth that never tips into sentimentality, and an ending that puts the friendship back together rather than tearing it down.

Delia lives outside Providence with her husband, Tom, a retired high-school band teacher who is still, thirty years on, slightly too loud; a much-photographed elderly beagle named Bishop; and a standing Thursday dinner with three women she has known since 1991. They have never once discussed the summer of 1994, and she has no intention of starting now.