The Last Chance : A Novel

Rona Jaffe was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1931. She was the daughter of Samuel Jaffe, a high school principal, & Diana (née Ginsberg) Jaffe, the daughter of Moses Ginsberg, the construction magnate who built the Carlyle Hotel. Rona was raised on the Upper East Side of Manhattan & was a lifelong New Yorker. She attended the Dalton School & graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 at the age of 19. In her early 20s she worked at Fawcett Publications, starting as a file clerk & working her way up to associate editor. At 25 she quit her job to focus on a novel she had started about women in the publishing industry. In 1958 The Best of Everything was published by Simon & Schuster. The work, provocative & prescient, hit a nerve among readers, especially women, & became an overnight success & bestseller. The following year a film adaptation was released starring Joan Crawford, Hope Lange, Suzy Parker, & Diane Baker. Jaffe went on to write 16 more books during her career. Suspenseful, captivating, and ultimately moving, The Last Chance is about four women friends in their late thirties trying to survive the dangerous and fast-paced world of New York City while also battling the subtle violence in their private lives. Each of them has dreams of finding love, success, and adventure in the big city. Each is desperately searching for a last chance. They will make difficult choices and face unbearable consequences, and by the end of the year, one of the women will die an unnatural and uncanny death . . . The Last Chance is a tense and unexpected story about what it takes to survive and find control over your fate when everything seems to be working against you.