Meg Waite Clayton Books In Order

Publication Order of Wednesday Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Author Meg Waite Clayton was born in Washington D.C. Since she loves to travel, she likes setting her novels in places she finds fascinating. She graduated from Glenbrook North High School in suburban Chicago, where she grew up.

She went to the University of Michigan believing that she would become a doctor, and came out a corporate lawyer in her tidy blue suit. She worked at Latham and Watkins, a law firm based in Los Angeles.

She was thirty-two when she worked up enough nerve to give writing a serious go, and pregnant with her second child, who was eleven when her debut novel was published. She has since found that writing is a lot tougher than it appears.

Through it all, she has written essays and short stories, and quite a few pages that have wound up in the so called drawer. She had great luck with the first piece she got published, it was an essay titled “What the Medal Means”, and sold quickly to the one publication she could imagine it being in, Runner’s World.

Fiction was slower going, however. She would send out stories a lot, revising each time until they finally got published such places as The Literary Review, Shenandoah, and The Virginia Quarterly Review.

As much as Meg enjoyed practicing law, her dream ever since she can remember was to become a novelist. She is very grateful to be able to call herself one.

Friendship plays such a big role in her writing because she has had to wave good-bye to quite a few dear friends after having to move so many times. Meg’s fiction is not autobiographical, but she does draw a lot from her own experiences and emotions while she is writing.

“The Language of Light” was a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. “The Race for Paris” was an Honorable Mention for Langum Prizes Historical Fiction. Meg’s books have been translated into Chinese, German, and Lituanian.

“The Wednesday Sisters” is the first novel in the “Wednesday” series and was released in the year 2008. For 35 years now, Brett, Frankie, Kath, Linda, and Ally have met up every Wednesday in the park near their homes close to Palo Alto, California. They are defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young mothers and homemakers are removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped a lot of the Bay Area in the year 1967.

The “Wednesday Sisters” appear to not have a lot in common. There is the brutally blunt Linda, who is a remarkable athlete. Frankie, who is a timid transplant from Chicago. Super intelligent and quirky Brett, who wears miniskirts and white gloves. Ally is quiet and has a secret. They bond over their shared love of the Miss America Pageant that they all watch each year, and of literature: Dickens, Fitzgerald, Austen, Plath, Eliot, and du Maurier.

As their kids grow, the quintet forms a writers circle, in order to express their dreams and hopes in stories, poems, and later on, books. They experience history as it happens: the race for the moon, Vietnam, and a women’s movement that puts to the test everything that they ever thought about themselves. At the same time, they support each other through the different changes in their personal lives brought on by illness, infidelity, failure, longing, and success.

“The Wednesday Daughters” is the second novel in the “Wednesday” series and was released in the year 2013. Hope Tantry shows up a cottage in England’s pastoral Lake District, a place that her mom, Ally, spent the final years of her life. Ally, a member of a group of women that called themselves the Wednesday Sisters, used the cottage while working on her unpublished biography of Beatrix Potter.

Traveling with Hope are buddies Julie and Anna Page, now are grown women fighting with issues of another era. Tucked in a hidden drawer, Hope discovers Ally’s stack of notebooks that were penned in a mysterious code. While Anna Page, Julie, and Hope attempt to figure out Ally’s writings, they have to confront their own struggles. Julie’s grief over her twin sister, Hope’s doubts about her marriage, and Anna’s fear of commitment.

“The Language of Light” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2003. A young mom, named Nelly Grace, moves her two kids to an insular, privileged, horse-breeding world in the countryside in Baltimore, after her husband died unexpectedly. In her struggle to rebuild her life is intertwined with her friendship with the matriarch of the fox-hunting community, Emma, her involvement with Dac, Emma’s son, and the desire she has to become a photojournalist like her dad.

She quickly learns that she is never going to be able to move on until she re-establishes a relationship with her dad, a man that has allowed ambition and fame to come first before his family.

“The Four Ms. Bradwells” is the second stand alone novel and was released in the year 2011. Ginger, Mia, Laney, and Betts, who were best friends since law school, have reunited for an extended as Betts is waiting for Senate confirmation of her appointment to the Supreme Court. Having been nicknamed ‘the Ms. Bradwells’ during their first class at the University of Michigan Law School in the year 1979. This is during a time when just three women had served full Senate terms and nobody had gotten appointed to the Court.

Each of the four has supported each other through each of life’s challenges: divorces and marriages, deaths and births, career triumphs and setbacks both small and large. Laney is the Good Girl. Ginger is the Rebel. Betts once was, and still is, the Funny One. Mia is the Savant.

When the Senate hearings reveal a deeply hidden skeleton in the friends’ closet, the Ms. Bradwells go to a summer house on the Chesapeake bay. Here, they find themselves reliving a darker period in their past, one which stirs up secrets they have kept for, and from, each other. They could change all of their lives forever.