In the middle of the twentieth century, in a home economics program at a prominent university, orphaned babies are used to teach mothering skills to young women. These "practice babies," are handed off from one mother-in-training to the next, usually staying in a "practice house" for a few years before being sent to adoptive families. For Henry House, the first practice baby to stay on at the university, finding love and learning to trust prove to be the work of a lifetime.

Sally Farber has everything a 40-year-old New Yorker could want: a loving doctor husband; two healthy, adorable daughters; great friends; and a charming book editor who used to be her lover and still calls her Cookie. Sally's fourth book is The History of Happiness, and there's the rub. The deeper she digs, the more elusive a definition of happiness becomes, and the more bedeviled she is by the guilty certainty that she isn't as happy as she should be.

They're an extraordinary family . . . Milo, husband and father, is a sculptor, and Lulu, wife and mother, is his model and protectress. Their daughters, Hillary and Jennifer, are beautiful, precocious young women already starting careers of their own. They spend their summers on an island off Cape Cod, but this may be Lulu's last. And now her family, one by one, must learn to accept the limits of love. A widely acclaimed debut novel.