After a messy break up with her longtime boyfriend, a woman faces losing both her house and her business. Consequently, she takes in three roomates: a freckled college graduate, mysterious divorced man, and a recently widowed female chef.

"When nineteen-year-old Abbey Bly gets the opportunity to study abroad for a year in London, it's the perfect chance to finally slip out from under the thumb of her beloved but overbearing retired rock star father. She's ready to be free, to discover herself-but first off, to meet the girls she's rooming with. That is, until she arrives at her gorgeous new flat to discover those roommates are actually all boys. Charming, funny, insufferably attractive...

Lylah and her friends can't wait to spend a night out together. Partying is the perfect way to let loose from the stress of life and school, and Lylah hopes that hitting the dance floor with Chace, her best friend, will bring them closer together. She's been crushing on him since they met. If only he thought of her the same way... The girls are touching up their makeup and the guys are sliding on their coats when the doorbell rings. No one is there....

The last thing Badger wants is a roommate, and certainly not Skunk, but since the house does not belong to him he does not have a choice; and soon everything in Badger's quiet and ordered life studying rocks is turned upside down (and where on earth did all the chickens come from)--but after he drives Skunk and his chickens away, Badger starts to miss his roommate and sets out to find him and make amends.

Life seems to be getting better and better for Mabel when she lands a scholarship to an East Coast village and joins her roommate, Genevra, on a trip to Genevra's lakeside estate cottage. When dark truths threaten Mabel's bright disposition, she must choose between exposing these people's wicked ways...or throwing herself into their morally ambiguous world, herself.

Clare Mann, the daughter of a middle-class Protestant family, and Sally Rose, a wealthy Jewish girl, become unlikely friends at Oberlin College in 1973, and form a bond that will sustain them through motherhood, marriage, divorce, and other challenges of life.

Having created a refuge in a rambling house for five misfits, failed poet Toby Dobbs finds the financial strain beyond his means and turns for advice to neighbor Leah Pilgrim, who helps him devise a plan to render his roommates independent.