It is the story of a female "artificial person", the eponymous Friday, genetically engineered to be stronger, faster, smarter, and generally better than normal humans.

Friday is employed as a highly self-sufficient "combat courier in a quasi-military organization", traveling across the globe and to some of the near-Earth space colonies.

Friday is their house-guest in British Canada (a country in the Balkanized North America) when a worldwide emergency known as Red Thursday occurs.

Various groups claim credit for the assassinations and sabotage, but Friday later learns that it is the result of a struggle between rival factions within the ultra-powerful Shipstone corporation.

The two become fugitives, and Friday travels through the California Confederacy, the Lone Star Republic (where she parts from Georges), and the Chicago Imperium as she attempts to reach her headquarters.

Living in Las Vegas Free State, Friday is eventually recruited for a courier job which will incidentally allow her to visit and evaluate several of the colonies she is considering as future homes.

After evading the ship's crew and the remaining agents, Friday and her friends settle in the colony to lead a quiet life as a group family.

The Shipstone, the extrasolar colonies Fiddler's Green, Proxima and Botany Bay, and the start of the balkanization of North America are again mentioned in the 1985 The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

The 1982 Library Journal review said that Heinlein "returns to an earlier style of brisk adventure mixed with polemic in the saga of special courier Friday Jones.

'"[9] Dave Langford reviewed Friday for White Dwarf #39, and stated that "Friday has a good future background, where all-powerful 'corporate states' on the lines of IBM think nothing of nuking pockets of undue sales resistance; lots to annoy even the least committed feminist (being raped is fine, thinks heroine Friday—if only the guy doesn't have bad breath); and a plotline with all the forceful thrust of overcooked spaghetti.