The girls

"In her first novel in a dozen years, the author of How She Died and Sweetsir gives us four grand old ladies, sisters, each unique and indelibly real, in a poignant and very funny story about the last American taboos, old age and dying."--BOOK JACKET. "As the novel opens, Jenny, the youngest at eighty, has flown down to Miami - that gaudy, pastel-hued haven of the elderly - to look after her two failing oldest sisters: Eva, ninety-five, always the family mainstay, and Naomi, ninety, who is riddled with cancer but still has her tart tongue and her jet-black head of hair. The fourth sister, Flora, has jet-black hair too, straight out of the bottle, but no head for the hard decisions facing Eva and Naomi. An energetic eighty-five, Flora spends her time dating ("He's mad about me, I only hope he can get it up!") and making the rounds of the retirement homes with her standup routine, the Sandra Bernhard of the senior set."--BOOK JACKET. "The Girls gives us these four full-if-wrinkled-fleshed woman with all their complaints and foibles, their self-absorption and downright orneriness, their unquenchable humor and immense, immense courage."--BOOK JACKET.