REACHING SEPTEMBER packs an emotional one-two punch Beginning as a laugh-out-loud comedy of manners, morals, and passions, and ending as an emotion-draining elegy, this the epic saga of a fifty-year friendship among four couples reaching their last years, the September, of life. Kate Christie, the irreverent and irrepressable narrator, takes us through her life's story beginning in post-war America and careening on through the end of the century. Nominated for the 2006 Snooker Prize for Literature, it is the story of the most passionate, true-to-life love affair in recent literature and an intensely moving account of how aging friends, gathered for their annual reunion, deal with the awesome finality of a death in their midst. Kate's rambling, nineteenth-century compound at Bar Harbor on the Maine coast, provides the atmospheric setting for this unforgettable memoir.