Friends since their youth in Brooklyn of the 1950s Margo and Angela have shared everything from wedding plans, to childrearing, to careers. Years later, when Angela's husband, a chemist and entrepreneur, recruits Margo and Kevin's son to run and eventually take over the family business, he promises to treat him as one of his own. But it is not that simple, as sibling rivalry, ambition, betrayal, and personal tragedies fracture the couple's friendship. Impelled by her training as psychotherapist, Margo remains intent on peeling back the layers of the past paying close attention to undercurrents in the relationship that were either denied or ignored. Eventually she discovers the mystery at the heart of the rupture. A riveting story, Hoops of Steel transpires against the background of the radically changing mores and expectations for women in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel is a meditation on long-term friendship and what it reveals - in its profound ordinariness and in its extraordinary power to sustain and nourish two women over a lifetime.