Take What You Can

’[A] nuanced exploration of friendship and motherhood’ * New York Times Book Review *
‘Naima Coster sifts through female friendships to uncover enduring truths’ * Time Magazine *
‘Take What You Can is so brilliantly, unbelievably good I have a burning in my heart from gulping it down too fast. It is somehow both taut and expansive-a literary feat I don’t understand-and it’s about the pleasure, grief, and devotion of daughters, mothers, lovers, wives. But mostly it’s about the coming together and coming apart of a singular epic friendship between two women. Love is utterly bewildering, and nobody writes about it better than Naima Coster’ – Catherine Newman
‘A magnificent book of emotional precision and startling insight, as awake to beauty and light as it is unafraid of the shadows, Take What You Can had me spellbound as I tore through it’ – Megha Majumdar
‘In Take What You Can, Naima Coster ensnares us in the whole-hearted, consuming and sometimes malefic love of Milly and Val, two friends with unresolved pasts and decidedly different approaches to their futures. A riveting, gut-churning, unputdownable examination of friendship that, at times makes you want to throw this book against a wall. In the best way. I have not loved to hate to love two fully fleshed out fictional women this much since I left Elena and Lila in Naples… A triumph of beautiful writing and unforgettable characters’ – Xochitl Gonzalez
‘Take What You Can bravely tackles so much of modern life…. Naima Coster’s gripping third novel is about chosen family, exploring the complex dynamic-perhaps more intimate than those of spouses, or even parents and their children-between truly close friends’ – Rumaan Alam
‘Long after reading the last page of Naima Coster’s latest exploration of love, I still feel Milly and Val pulsing through my soul. Their story of a shaky friendship amid the disorienting chaos of new motherhood made me feel seen, understood, and literally breathless, gasping at the precise, sophisticated ways these women know how to cut each other, then doctor the wounds. Take What You Can is the kind of novel you’ll be hungry to share with your own friends, debating who’s right, who’s wrong, and who could use a hug the most’ – Dawnie Walton

Naima Coster lives in Brooklyn. She has an MA in English from Fordham University and an MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Guernica and The Sunday Times, among others. She was awarded the Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize from the Brooklyn Film & Arts Festival for her personal essay “Remembering When Brooklyn Was Mine” in The New York Times. Her debut Halsey Street was a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award.

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