After more than two decades abroad, Lillie Carrigan – now in her mid-forties – returns to New York for a year to teach at Barnard College, determined to believe the past is finally behind her. In England, she has built a life of poise and apparent stability with a British artist. Now, back in the land of her childhood, old loyalties, old wounds and old desires begin to stir.
As Lillie is drawn once more into the orbit of her childhood friend Lara, her glamorous, brittle friend Mallory, and the husband she thought she had left far behind, the carefully ordered story she tells herself starts to come apart. Against the turbulence of the late 1960s and the rising force of Women’s Liberation, What Other Years Have Done is a seductive, piercing novel of memory, grief, female friendship, betrayal, and the dangerous persistence of love.