Then Came You

A Novel

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scholarship and a family she’s ashamed to invite to Parents’ Weekend. Tall, blond, and outwardly identical to her wealthy prep-school-educated classmates, her plan is to take the ten thousand dollars she’ll receive from donating her “pedigree” eggs and try to save her father from addiction…

Annie Barrow is a thirty-four-year-old working-class married mother of two who scrapes by on her husband’s single paycheck. After watching a TV show about surrogates, she thinks she’s found a way to recover a sense of purpose and bring in some extra cash…

India Bishop, thirty-eight (really forty-three), believes she’s found her happy ending when she marries a very wealthy and much older man, Marcus Croft, but decides that a baby will seal the deal. When all of her attempts at pregnancy fail, she turns to technology, and Annie and Jules, to help make her dreams come true…

But each woman’s plans are thrown into disarray when Marcus suddenly dies, and his twenty-three-year-old daughter Bettina is named guardian of the unborn child. As the baby’s due date draws near, these four women—with nothing and everything in common—discover what makes each of them a mother in her own right.

With her laugh-out-loud humor, startling tenderness, and spot-on characterizations, Jennifer Weiner once again takes listeners into the heart of women’s lives in America, in an unforgettable, timely tale that interweaves themes of class and entitlement, surrogacy and donorship, parental rights and the measure of motherhood.
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  • Simon & Schuster Audio | 
  • 10 disks | 
  • ISBN 9781442340688 | 
  • July 2011
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JULES

The man in the suit was watching me again.

It was March of my senior year in college, a clear, chilly afternoon, when I felt what was, by then, the familiar weight of a man’s gaze, while I sat by myself in the food court. I looked up from my dinner, and there he was, at the end of the line for the salad place, looking at me the way he had for the past three weeks.

I sighed. The mall was one of my favorite places, and I didn’t want to give it up because of some creep.

I’d found the mall my freshman year. If you walked off campus, across Nassau Street and into...

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Book Reviews

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Then Came You includes discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Jennifer Weiner. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.


Questions & Topics for Discussion


  1. Discuss the different mothers that make up Then Came You. How does the behavior of these women directly affect their children?
  2. India, Annie, and Jules are all motivated, to a large degree, by financial gain. How did this affect your feelings towards them? Were some of their motivations more acceptable to you than others?
  3. When visiting her father in Pittsburgh, Jules comments, “I don’t make excuses. I know what he’s doing is illegal. I know that he’s a drain on taxpayers’ resources, that people who work hard at their jobs are the ones paying for his apartment and his food, for the cops that bust him and the counselors who hand him pamphlets about AA and methadone…But he’s my father…and I don’t believe that it’s his fault. It’s not like he’s lazy, some privileged rich kid trying to escape from some imaginary heartache or chasing some feel-good high. He takes drugs so that he can feel something close
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Audio excerpt from THEN CAME YOU

Listen to an audio excerpt from THEN CAME YOU By Jennifer Weiner, read by AnnaLynne McCord

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