CLUTCH
A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 from LitHub
Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?
As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges,
A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 from LitHub
Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love?
As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare bond that college brochures promise—friendship that lasts a lifetime. Two decades later, the women are spread across the country but remain firmly tethered through their ever-unfurling group chat. They’ve made it through COVID and childbirth and midcareer challenges, but no one can anticipate what’s coming down the pike.
The five women converge on Palm Springs for a long overdue reunion: Gregg, who has forged a path as a progressive Texas legislator, is facing a huge decision about her political future. Reba, who moved back to the Bay Area after decades away, is deep in IVF treatments while caring for her aging parents and navigating a San Francisco she hardly recognizes. Hillary’s medical career in Chicago is going great—but at home, her husband’s struggles with addiction have derailed their life. In New York City, Bella faces the biggest case in her career as a litigator while her home life crumbles around her, and across the river in Brooklyn, Carson is working on a new novel as well as forging a possible relationship with the father she’s never met.
Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.
- Tin House
- Hardcover
- February 2026
- 400 Pages
- 9781963108668
Buy the Book
$28.00
About Emily Nemens
Emily Nemens’s debut novel, The Cactus League, was a New York Times Book ReviewEditors’ Choice and named one of NPR’s and Lit Hub’s favorite books of 2020. Her stories have appeared in BOMB, The Gettysburg Review, n+1, and elsewhere; her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker and in collaboration with Harvey Pekar. Emily spent over a decade editing literary quarterlies, including leading The Paris Review and serving as co-editor and prose editor of The Southern Review. She held the 2022-23 Picador Professorship (University of Leipzig) and teaches in the MFA program at Bennington College. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband and dog.
Praise
“A big, beautiful novel about what friendship means as we get older.”—LitHub
“What I really like about this book is that none of the five women feel overly like stereotypes or even archetypes . . . for these friends, even when things go catastrophically wrong, you feel comforted. It’s a real pleasure to settle in to read.” —The New York Times Book Review Podcast, A Most Anticipated Book of Winter
“Centers wit, joy, and laughter alongside the sorrows and frustrations of midlife, reaffirming the importance of deep and abiding friendships.” —BookPage
“Impressive. . . . [a] gut-punch climax, rewarding the reader who’s paying attention to all the details.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Engaging. . . . The draw here is spending time with these friends, whose complex lives Nemens cannily and sometimes heartrendingly portrays as they go through so much, together and alone.”—Booklist
Discussion Questions
1) Clutch opens in Palm Springs, during a trip where the friends reunite. Why do you think it was important to meet these friends on vacation, rather than in one of their hometowns or at a life event such as a wedding, funeral, or birth? What does this “neutral space” of a girls’ trip allow for?
2) Consider the title. Why do you think the author chose “clutch”? The word has many meanings, and can be used as a noun, adjective, or verb. Which definition(s) resonated most with you?
3) Do you have a group of friends that you would consider your “clutch”? How do group chats function in your own life?
4) Clutch is told from an omniscient point of view. Why do you think the author chose to write the story from this perspective rather than, say, an alternating first person?
5) The friend group has known each other for two decades, first meeting during their formative college years. How does their long-shared history affect their present relationships? In what ways does the depth of their bond and the passage of time both strengthen and complicate their connection?
6) The women are far-flung across the United States. Discuss how locales—both where they currently reside and where the women are from—impact and/or illuminate their personalities.
7) Consider the five women’s jobs, personalities, and life goals—is the range an asset in this group? When does difference create conflict and when does it allow for complementary harmony?
8) The characters in Clutch are in the sandwich generation (caring for both young children and elderly parents). How does this dynamic impact the women as the novel unfolds?
9) Clutch is a contemporary novel, engaging with technology, current events, politics, and other facets of modern life. Discuss how the novel might’ve been different had it been set ten, twenty, or fifty years ago.
10) Consider the ending. What do you think the author wants to convey about friendship and time?