Union Square: A NOVEL

Taking up where her celebrated "Rivington Street" left off, Meredith Tax's "Union Square" brims over with the passions and struggles of five indomitable women: Hannah Levy, the Russian immigrant matriarch; Sarah, a communist organizer who sides with the union - and against her Bolshevik husband - in opposing the Hitler-Stalin pact; Ruby, who covertly undercuts her department store magnate husband's business with her own clothing designs; Rachel, a wealthy widow dedicated to bohemian life and the pleasures of the Jazz Age; and Rachel's sister-in-law, Tish, a lesbian expatriate who seeks sexual and artistic fulfillment in the salons of Paris and Weimar Germany. Gutsy and engrossing, "Union Square" paints a complex, believable picture of the tumultuous years between the end of the First World War and the eve of the Second.