Clutch: A Novel

by Emily Nemens

Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?

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 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.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Friendship, Audiobook, Book Club, Contemporary, Ebooks

Audible Audio

First published February 3, 2026

About the author

Emily 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. Nemens 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.

Reviews

[Nilufer Ozmekik · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a big-hearted, clear-eyed novel about five women—Reba, Hillary, Carson, Gregg, and Bella—who’ve known one another long enough to finish each other’s sentences and still be shocked by what the next season of life demands. Nemens builds a whole ecosystem of work, love, caregiving, ambition, and regret, then throws a reunion in Palm Springs like a match into dry grass. From there, she follows each woman across cities and crises—a politician weighing power and principle, a doctor holding a marriage together while addiction razes the foundation, a lawyer chasing a career-defining case as the home front splinters, a writer reaching for the page and a parent she’s never had, and a daughter juggling IVF with elder care. The book keeps asking the question that undoes me: when your own fingernails are barely hanging on, how do you still reach for your people?

What dazzled me most is the precision: scene to scene, Nemens slides between perspectives with the confidence of a director who knows every blocking mark. The observations are knife-clean but generous—smart without sneer, tender without treacle. The group dynamic rings painfully true: the splintering into duos and trios, the micro-alliances, the unspoken tallies, the way one phone buzz can reroute a day. It’s also refreshingly honest about trade-offs: how “having it all” often means “holding too much,” and how friendship can be the clutch—both the grasp and the mechanism—that keeps the engine from stalling. If you love contemporary fiction that respects adult complexity (careers, money, health, politics, parenting, desire) and still believes in joy, this is your lane.

Tiny quibbles? With five voices, the on-ramp takes a couple chapters to settle (worth it), and a thread or two lingers in a purposeful gray that invites discussion. But the cumulative effect is immersive and deeply human. I closed the book feeling wrung out in the best way and weirdly hopeful—like I’d watched five separate storms blow through and leave a clearer sky.

Verdict: absorbing, thoughtful, and emotionally aerobic. Perfect for readers who crave character-driven storytelling with real stakes, real consequences, and a sincere belief that friendship—imperfect, evolving, stubborn—still saves us.

A very huge thanks to NetGalley and Zando | Tin House for sharing this meaningful, beautifully written women’s fiction digital reviewer copy in exchange for my honest opinions.

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[Meagan (Meagansbookclub) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Might be a case of a lot of words spoken without saying much.

[Kate O'Shea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well I can breathe a sigh of relief now that's over. I'm afraid this book simply wasn't for me despite thinking the premise sounded interesting.

Five college friends get together for a weekend. They have been friends for twenty years but this year will bring more challenges and shocks than they have dealt with for a long time. Gregg is unhappily pregnant and wanting to run for Congress; Reba is desperate to become pregnant and worried about her ageing parents; Hillary is dealing with her estranged husband's drug addiction; Carson has just sent her latest novel to her agent but has heard nothing back; and Bella is running on empty dealing with two young children, a selfish husband and with a big trial to prepare for. Whilst the women are always "there" for each other their own lives will be tested to breaking point.

I am afraid that I found each of the women incredibly unlikeable and didn't warm to any. They all seemed incredibly privileged, one way or another (except perhaps Hillary) but none of them appreciated their good fortune. I have to confess to being somewhat sympathetic to the men in their lives and yet really quite irritated with the women for taking the consequences of their past decisions lying down.

I confess to having yelled at this book quite a lot and also speed reading quite lengthy sections towards the end.

Not my cup of tea at all.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Zando Projects for the advance review copy.

[Abby · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know better than to read a book where two women are named Carson and Gregg. It will be annoying.

[Ten Cats Reading · Rating 2 out of 5]

⭐⭐.5

DNF @ p80

I grabbed this because it's the latest from Tin House press. I've enjoyed their releases over the years, mostly litfic with a subversive edge. I grabbed this book, expecting to find something different and maybe a little experimental.

I didn't enjoy it though. And I found out in my research that the Tin House I knew closed five years ago. Just recently, the imprint was purchased. So, new editors, and thus new, more mainstream direction.

Thank you NetGalley and publisher for the arc!📚

[Y]

Unfortunately I have to dnf this at 20%. I find it very hard to remember who is who, and I dislike the narration style. There is a lot of text in past perfect tense, giving you pieces of backstory of a character during the current scene, which is in past simple tense, it was kind of exhausting to read. I think I could have followed this better if we first established each character and their backstory separately, then entered the current events. As it is, I can't get invested in the characters and keep zoning out of the storyline.

[Jenna (semi-hiatus, out touching grass 🤌🌱…!) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is like a weird combination between Ducks, Newburyport and an elder millennial version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group. I liked both of those books, and I imagine this one will likely be appreciated and respected as well. But while it was all perfectly competent enough, it just wasn’t quite for me.


I really liked a LOT of this book’s features: sort of epic (and it’s pretty long), intertwined stories of a friend group’s members coming of age and relationships over time, from college to midlife, coping with family, interpersonal, and career challenges and other life problems and stressors, all related in a stream of consciousness-style narration with alternating character perspectives. However, I struggled to invest in the book or connect with its characters, or to generally feel like I had some significant stake in its offerings.


Some of this may be due to factors other reviewers have mentioned, including some reliance on heavily written metaphor, weird occasional extended use of the pluperfect tense, unlikeable characters who seem pretty privileged and entitled, and lack of diverse character rep overall. But it’s hard to put my finger on exactly why this book wasn’t a good fit. As other reviewers have suggested, it just landed kind of oddly with me.


I think one major barrier is that when compared with many similar books — Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings is a favorite that comes to mind — this one doesn’t quite hold up. There are an awful lot of books like this, and I’m afraid the point of this particular one was lost on me. Yet I think it’s a fine enough book, and this well may be a matter of taste or timing. I remember the author’s preceding novel was commended by many.


I should mention that there is some animal cruelty that I could have done without, but it seems like this turned out okay in the very end.


Thank you so much to the author, NetGalley, and Zando/Tin House for the ARC. Clutch is due out on February 3, 2026.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wanted to like this so much more than i did. it felt incredibly dense for a book that doesn't really have a plot

[Helen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I really tried to get into this book. I read up to 40% but I just found the characters so bland and uninteresting. I received an ARC from the publisher and Netgalley. I am sorry but this book just did not hold my interest.

[Indhu Rammohan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I’m so grateful to be done with this. If I didn’t have an obsessive compulsive personality I would’ve DNF’d 10 pages in but alas….

I guess I don’t really know what the author was trying to do with this story. There was no plot until the last third of the book (and even then—weak), and certainly no characterization. I couldn’t tell the characters apart even by the end, let alone all of their husbands and offspring. The women all blended together with zero personality among them. The superfluous sentences felt self indulgent and annoyed me!

I doubt this poor excuse for a novel would even appeal to the painfully bland middle aged upper middle class white women that are its focus.

[Ellen Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book! I love books that follow friendships over several decades. It’s so relatable with the issues they’re all trying to navigate. Also very relevant given that it covers Covid and beyond to current times. As their lives ebb and flow, they try to lean on each other. I loved the character development and the relationships between the friend group. This is a book I will always treasure.

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

[Tamzen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book could have been an email.

Clutch is the story of 5 friends from college, all women who are at and around 40, dealing with the life of it all. They have spouses or don't, have kids or don't, and struggle to make time to catch up. The book starts with the crew taking a trip to Palm Springs together, and what happens there? A lot of nothing, for chapter upon chapter upon chapter.

But at the start of the book, I thought, this writing is kind of fun. It's very flowery, but sort of inside-the-head and giving what seems to be soundness to each character. It never stopped, though. The flowery language just kept going, frustrating me as whole chapters would go by, circling the drain of the story, then finally hitting maybe like a sentence's worth of action. And then boom, it was time for the next chapter, and half the time it would change characters, locations, and context. It became an infuriating read by the end, and I only finished it because I wanted so badly to know there was a reason for the story.

There was not.

The moral of the story is that men suck? Women suck? Don't hitch your wagon to anything because it will inevitably fall off? I think it was meant to be an ode to realistic friendship, but it struggled to even show that these women were friends, save a few instances of individual friendships, not as a whole group of five. The final scene was maybe the best scene of friendship and even it INFURIATED me.

In conclusion, at least this book made me feel something, I'll give it that. Unfortunately, that feeling was deep dislike.

Thanks to Netgalley and Tin House for the e-ARC!

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25 stars. Five women, Harvard alums—best friends since college and now in their forties, embark on a trip to Palm Springs for an intimate gathering to share the tea on the last two decades.
Clutch felt realistic, and am happy to find inside these pages is a beautifully written story praising friendship and womanhood through life’s challenges of career, motherhood, troubling relationships, addiction, love and marriage.. all as it flows through varied emotions of grief, pain and joy. You feel moved by their distinct connection to one another, and are shown the individuality of each woman. Fantastic story. Pub. 2/3/26

Many thanks to NetGalley and Zando // Tin House for an advance reader’s copy. All opinions are my own.

[Miss✧Pickypants ᓚᘏᗢ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed where this book took me once I was able to remember who each of the five characters were. As other reviewers noted, it took a little more effort to get fully immersed in the story as it takes a few chapters before readers (like me!) get a true sense of each separate woman. As soon as I was able to keep everything straight, I was able to appreciate the smart, well-constructed writing.

The story spans a 20+ friendship between these 5 BFFs. The author manages to pretty much throw in the kitchen sink with the various storylines. If you can think of a current affair or relevant theme that took place from the 1990s to now, there is a 90% chance it is incorporated into the lives of the women in this book. This isn't a bad thing, it definitely kept me entertained but if you aren't a fan of when things start to get a bit farfetched then you may not find this as fun as I did.

[Trisha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Five women become friends and we see their friendship through marriages, children, midlife, and more.

This was an interesting take on female friendships and one that was a bit hard to get into. It's definitely literary fiction as you go through the ups an downs of their lives, there is no real plot other than their own life dramas.

The women are really hard to like, at first. They are privileged and competitive and seem to only hold onto the friendship to have someone to compare lives with (and make themselves feel better). It was nice to see them age and get older and really start to grow and become better people and friends, especially as they got to know themselves better. It was a bit of a slow read and one that I struggled to stay engaged with. Just wasn't my cup of tea.

A huge thank you to the author and publisher for providing an e-ARC via Netgalley. This does not affect my opinion regarding the book.

[Jeanmarie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. I should have DNFed this but I refused to believe that a publisher would print a 439 page book that had not one single interesting character or viewpoint. I can honestly say that, in the last 10 pages of this book, I was STILL unsure of which name belonged to which character and what was it that Hillary even did for a living. This book was an outright disaster. Shame on this editor and publisher.
PS if you look, I have NEVER trashed a book on this site like this. That’s how infuriated I am at this complete waste of my precious reading time.

[MC Fletcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

What in the SAT word, spelling bee, merriam-webster’s dictionary?!?! Seriously had to look up words constantly to just get the gist of a sentence. Besides being literally difficult to read and hard to get into, I did enjoy the last 1/10th of the book

[Seawitch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book about a group of 5 women friends and their ties to each other since college, and now as they are turning 40, reads like a frenetic stream of consciousness. Sometimes the narrator switched from one paragraph to another as the intertwined stories careened along.

Millennials will relate to all the angst of parenthood and infertility and “having it all” and making one’s mark in whatever profession you’ve chosen or rejected.

The men in the story are albatrosses and sometimes shockingly cruel.

The end left me reeling and I was relieved to step off this wild ride.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

[Tell · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.5)

A beautiful mediation on friendship told in a kaleidoscopic, wide ranging omniscient POV. Immediately you're plunged into the worlds of all five friends, simultaneously and continuously dipping in and out of their lives as they process the chaos of being in their forties.

Dense at times, and definitely some chapters that were there for texture and color- Nemens is a great writer who created five swirling lives for the reader to immerse themselves in and ponder the meaning of connection across decades.

[Liz Hein · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 need to unpack why dislikable characters affected my reading experience more than normal here. But one line made me cry, so obviously something clicked. The men in this book, oof.

[Cat Greenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

if the white women friend group in white lotus had a whole book

[Christie Bane · Rating 2 out of 5]

How a book about a tight-knit group of women who have been friends since college could get such a bad review from me, I don't even know. Nevertheless, here we are. All five of these women lead privileged lives, even the "starving author" who was only poor by comparison to the other four, and I did not feel sympathetic to them even from the beginning. I also felt like despite the amount of time put into describing each one and her individual struggles with her man (this group was 100% heterosexual), I had a really hard time telling them apart until like 60% into the book. It was like it was the same flat character in five different career paths. I really feel bad giving a review like this, but this book was a slog for me.

Side note: I HATED the names of the women in this book. Carson, Gregg, Reba, Bella, and Hillary.

[Victoria · Rating 1 out of 5]

Feels like a book about women written by a man but yet it isn’t.

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

What whiplash! All feelings and sincerity without enough edge or wit or clever dialogue. So close! But good god these ladies became less and less likeable the more I got to know them. Very into the premise and the accurate and lovely acknowledgment of missing/having limited time with friends and the drifting in and out of relationships that are meaningful and fundamentally easy and the ones women rely on throughout our lives. Just not into the group chat members in this particular friend group. Like what would their emoji group chat picture even be? CERTAINLY NOT THE ONES MY FRIENDS USE, OK?

[Leah Kitsis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whole lotta words, whole little plot. It took me a while to differentiate the five main women, let alone keep track of their spouses and kids. I found myself especially engaged in Gregg and Hillary’s sections. JUSTICE FOR GREGG’S CORGIS!!

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine being stuck on a girls trip but with none of your friends.

[Danna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clutch by Emily Nemens is a sprawling novel that details the lives of five women who have just turned 40, having been best friends since college. It was laconic, gorgeous writing; I was grateful to have a long plane ride to plow through Clutch because otherwise it would have taken me a week. The story grabbed me, I loved the characters, and yet, it moved slowly.

I found Nemens’s writing remarkable: the way she can tell what’s happening for multiple characters simultaneously in any given moment felt unique and skillful. A small example:
“(Some of the women thought this was the ultimate settled, while others considered it settling … that wee gerund bore so much judgment.)”

And it’s not lost on me that part of why this book rang so true is life stage. These women turned 40 the same year as me. Their twenties were filled with the same cultural moments as my own. Their 40s, the same (now-ish).

Gregg is a Texas politician, a la Wendy Davis, championing for reproductive rights while married to an Elon Musk lookalike. Carson is a novelist, who isn’t exactly successful or unsuccessful, but hopes to hit it big with book 2. Bella is a lawyer at a cutthroat firm, but her pregnancy history and time as a mother have made it hard for her to make a name for herself. Reba, independently wealthy and already retired, is aiding her aging parents in the Bay Area while working overtime to become a mother. And Hillary, a physician and mother married to a drug addict.

After not seeing each other as a quintet for years, they get together in Palm Springs. It’s lovely and bittersweet. They’re the same and not. And so they make a commitment to see each other more, not realizing how soon life will spiral for each of them, requiring a lot more face time than anyone could have imagined. This also rang true for me, as one of my best childhood friends had an analogous experience to one of the characters this year, pushing us together across thousands of miles three times in close succession.

Overall, I loved Clutch and now want to read Nemens’s other work. It was long, happy, hard, sad, victorious, and ultimately, worth it. I’ll be thinking about these characters for a while.

Highly recommended. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Some favorite passages:
“But there is cognizance, and there is self-regulation, and sometimes, despite the former, her bossiness still showed up like a flash of gold in the back of her mouth.”

“‘Why do you think Tim Cook created that screen time report?’
“To make us feel inadequate anew, Bella thought.”

“That algorithm knew her so well. Better than Bill, anyway…”

“‘Live shooter training,’ Gregg said, adding that everyone in the capitol complex had to do it, along with modules on sexual harassment and anticorruption. Gregg spat into the sink before she continued. ‘I know how to identify nepotism and avoid getting stabbed in the neck.’”

“Of course Reba had regrets. They all did, and more would invariably come. Steering clear wasn’t the project, it was accepting them and finding ways to make them productively dissipate. Theirs was a long-term project of regret management, supporting one another as each tried to control her remorse like it was the water level on some persnickety reservoir. They each had access to a series of spigots, inflows and out-, and had to factor in evaporation. That they might have total control of their emotional lake was as likely as claiming the control of nature, which was unattainable…”

“That getting high did not make him happy, but he could not be happy when all he thought of was his next score?”

“Bella gathered their mail from the mail room: a package (a pair of sneakers, another Instagram impulse buy; it was remarkable what she could purchase on days when it felt like she was too busy to chew, much less swallow)…”

[Joni Daniels · Rating 2 out of 5]

Five very different college girlfriends get together for a weekend 20 years after they graduate. The characters are unlikable and upper middle class so their challenges are relationship based and seem to all be rooted in disappointment. Characters named Greg and Carson, both female… feels pretty precious. The writing is overdone: flowery adjectives and metaphors to describe basic action. Lots of past history being given while in the present tries to bring the reader up to speed with what the characters already know seems like it should have just been written in chronological order. It simply got too annoying - which distracted me from being interested in finishing.

[Sacha · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

Friendship is a vital part of our lives, and its scope changes dramatically as we do. As our obligations and social structures evolve, our bonds do, too. That's the focus of this novel, centering on five women who were close in college and are still bound by time, shared experience, and of course love.

Structurally, I FELT the passage of time, and that was periodically a barrier. Mimicking actual life, there are moments that seem to really slow and get a lot of attention and detail and others that fly by. From a reader's perspective, this can pose challenges with engagement. Additionally, there are one to two too many friends in this group. As is always the case when dealing with either a family or friend structure like this, some characters are more compelling than others. I did have a hard time keeping some of them straight and being equally concerned with each character's outcomes. Often, I thought I'd have enjoyed getting to know a smaller group better versus the diluted version with an extra (IMO) character or two.

This is the kind of book that hits right at a certain age and experience. Folks who have gone through multiple seasons of life and through associated friendship transitions will appreciate the way those details are handled and modeled here. At the same time, they may also struggle - as I did - with the long journey.

I enjoyed this read overall and will look forward to more from this author.

*Special thanks to NetGalley and Tin House for this arc, which I received in exchange for an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.

[Jude Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

A portrait of friendship in your forties, told through the lens of five grown college best friends on a girls’ trip. Well-paced and filled with clever, roll off the tongue, fun to read, prose. Such a good read, not only because the author is whip smart 🤓 but also because it was filled with down-to-earth humor, friendship, and love. ❤️

As someone who truly values female friendship I connected with this book instantly. Love me a tightknit, ride or die group of gals in real life and literature. The power of female friendship is a very real thing, and I’m endlessly grateful for it. Like these five friends, different in so many ways; securely planted in varying walks of life, from a lawyer to an aspiring author. But the same in the ways that count, like being loyal and loving, even when they piss each other off or don’t agree with each other’s life choices. Not grab a cup of coffee kind of friends or casual school mom friends, help you bury a body kind of friends. 🪦

And really, at the end of the day, isn’t that the kind of friend we all want? A ‘I'd help you cover up a murder’ kind of friend. Umm, no, just me hehe 😶‍🌫️❤️