Joan howard has spent thirty years of marriage doing what’s expected of Howard women: shopping, dressing well, and keeping a beautiful home. Now, with those children grown and gone to college, a local tragedy brings the three into contact again. And alice, feeling increasingly distant from her husband, and alienated from her once fit body, takes up running again.
Meanwhile, ellie’s efforts to expand her accounting business lead to a new friendship that clashes with her family’s traditional worldview. Unfulfilled, her boredom and emptiness eventually find a secret outlet at the local casino. But a terrifying ordeal shatters her confidence and spurs a decision that will affect all three women in different ways.
Over the course of an eventful year, plan—and find the freedom, Ellie, and Joan will meet every other Wednesday to talk, and the courage, Alice, to redefine themselves. Praise for the novels of susan Kietzman“Beautifully written and closely observed…captures the deep and complicated love of family.
Reading this lovely novel, I felt the embrace of summer on the shoreline.
Home for the Summer A Yorktide, Maine Novel
Praise for the novels of holly Chamberlin“Chamberlin’s latest is a great summer read but with substance. Bella, now seventeen, is withdrawn and wary, and Frieda fears losing her too. At her mother’s urging, Frieda decides to return to Yorktide with Bella for the summer. Frieda loves her mother’s old farmhouse, and the girls have grown closer there, sharing a bedroom and spinning stories into the night.
Bella gets a job in a local shop, and little by little edges her way back into the world. It will find a wide audience in its exploration of sisterhood, family, and loss. Library journal on summer with My Sisters“Nostalgia over real-life friendships lost and regained pulls readers into the story. Usa today on Summer Friends.
But that was before—when tragedy was something that happened to other families.
Summer Dance
Winner of the 2018 pnwa nancy pearl awardnew york times and USA Today bestselling author Nan Rossiter brings together characters from her acclaimed novel Nantucket in a powerful, heartwarming love story that bridges past and present. When liam tate was seven years old, his uncle Cooper opened his heart and his Nantucket home to him.
. He finds a sparsely furnished beach cottage, about as far from Vietnam as he can get. The effects of that fiery affair can still be felt decades later. But even here, Cooper can’t withdraw from the world entirely. And as the story unfolds, there are new lessons for all to learn about life’s triumphs and heartaches, and about loving enough to let go.
Praise for the novels of nan rossiter“nan rossiter is at the peak of her storytelling abilities with Under a Summer Sky, which is told with the kind of compassion, grace, and wisdom that is nearly unrivaled in contemporary fiction. Examiner. Com“eloquent and surprising.
A Changing Marriage
Praise for susan kietzman's The Good Life"Kietzman's well crafted characterizations give the narrative its depth. In this poignant and insightful new novel, the acclaimed author of The Good Life delves beneath the shimmering surface of one couple's evolving marriage. Readers will find themselves drawn into the tragedies and triumphs of this fictional family—distinct and yet utterly relatable.
Hartford Books Examiner. What happens when reality erodes your ideal relationship? how do you know when to stay and when to go? And how much can any marriage endure before it becomes just another statistic? Profoundly honest and revealing, A Changing Marriage is a vivid portrait of relationships at their most intricate—and most familiar.
Bob's career is soaring and Karen has a fulfilling job of her own—one that's put on hold when she becomes pregnant.
The Summer Cottage
The youngest of four, she shared her mother Claire’s athletic genes and relished the orchestrated games and competitions that filled those warm, endless days. Unlike her older siblings—fiery charlotte, ambitious Thomas, middle-child Pammy—Helen rarely felt the pressure of her mother’s high expectations.
Thirty years later, helen is the sole caregiver for Claire, with her brother and sisters scattered, now terminally ill. During this time together, Pammy, Charlotte, Helen, and Thomas will revisit their long-ago decisions and assumptions. Knowing her death is imminent, claire has put helen in the awkward position of telling the others that she plans on leaving everything, including the cottage, to Helen when she dies—unless everyone comes to the shore for a long weekend over the Fourth of July.
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The Beach House: Coming Home: A Novel
After you’ve given your baby to strangers, Melinda Campbell was fifteen and a half, what do you say when someone asks if you have children?Fourteen years ago, pregnant and terrified. His life revolves around his adopted daughter, Shiloh, the girl who’s owned his heart from the moment he first held her as an infant.
Desperate to protect her baby from a malicious grandfather and needed at home to take care of her own critically ill father, Melinda makes the most generous, heart-wrenching choice of all: adoption. Now she’s living the successful life her father struggled to give her, but missing her daughter with a longing that shadows every joy.
Jeremy richmond knows the beach house the way a painter knows his canvas, intimately and focused on detail. When shiloh tells her father she’s tired of fighting her illness and wants to meet her biological mother before it’s too late, Jeremy agrees to find a woman he has no desire to meet. From the moment melinda and Jeremy come face-to-face, they realize their worlds will never be the same.
They were a picture-perfect family until Shiloh was diagnosed with pediatric lupus and Jeremy’s wife walked away.
The Good Life
She has worked in both magazine and newspaper publishing and currently writes grants for the Mystic Seaport Museum. Between workouts, and shopping, charity events, Ann Barons keeps her days as full as her walk-in closets. She shares an immaculate house with her CEO husband, Mike, and their two teenagers, Nate and Lauren.
Timely, poignant, and wise, the good life is a deeply satisfying and beautifully written story about the complex relationships between parents and children--and the gap that often lies between what we seek, and what will truly make us whole. But nothing can prepare her for the transformations ahead. But it's ann who must make the biggest leap, and confront the choices and values that have kept her floating on life's surface for so long.
Lauren blossoms under Eileen's guidance, and even workaholic Mike finds time to attend high-school football games. Soon, her mother eileen is popping in to prepare soups and roasts in Ann's underused kitchen, while the usually surly Nate forms an alliance with his ailing grandfather. The moving story of a family's rebirth through the simple but profound acts of daily kindness and sacrifice.
Cicada Summer
Time and neglect, along with rats and raccoons, have ravaged it inside and out. Her newest project is a dilapidated, century-old house just a few blocks from Geneva Lake, Wisconsin. She’s also experienced the thrill of making each one into a home. In just a few weeks—by the time the cicadas make their scheduled reappearance after seventeen years underground—the house should be ready to sell.
. A captivating novel about the power of redemption. Jen lancaster, New York Times bestselling author. Amid overgrown grounds and rooms brimming with debris, hardwood floors hidden beneath layers of linoleum and grime—and carved initials that reveal a long-ago love story involving Alex’s elderly neighbor, Alex finds treasures—pocket doors, Elsie, and another cicada summer.
For so long she felt sure that moving on was the only option, and everything she’s learning in it, but maybe this house, could give Alex room for a second chance .
The Forever Summer
A national bestseller*when a dna test reveals long-buried secrets, three generations of women reunite on Cape Cod for the homecoming of a lifetime. Marin bishop has always played by the rules, and it's paid off: at twenty-eight she has a handsome fiancé, a prestigious Manhattan legal career, and the hard-won admiration of her father.
Seeking escape, marin agrees to a road trip to meet the grandmother she never knew she had. But one moment of weakness leaves Marin unemployed and alone, all in a single day. As the summer unfolds at her grandmother's quaint beachside B&B, it becomes clear that the truth of her half-sister is just the beginning of revelations that will change Marin's life forever.
Then a woman claiming to be Marin's half-sister shows up, and it's all Marin can do not to break down completely.
Slightly South of Simple: A Novel The Peachtree Bluff Series Book 1
Even more discomfiting, when someone from her past reappears in Ansley's life, the secret she’s harbored from her daughters their entire lives might finally be forced into the open. But when her second daughter sloane, and youngest daughter and successful actress Emerson join the fray, whose military husband is overseas, Ansley begins to feel like the piece of herself she had finally found might be slipping from her grasp.
Now the proud owner of a charming waterfront design business and finally standing on her own two feet, Ansley welcomes Caroline and her brood back with open arms. National bestseller *glitter guide’s “must reads for april” *popsugar’s “ultimate summer reading” *bustle’s Books to Read and Discuss With Your Mom and Grandma *New York Live’s “Ashley’s A-List” Pick “One of the hottest new Southern writers.
Parade from the next “major voice in southern fiction” elin hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author comes the first in an all-new series chronicling the journeys of three sisters and their mother—and a secret from their past that has the potential to tear them apart and reshape their very definition of what it means to be a family.
Caroline murphy swore she’d never set foot back in the small southern town of peachtree bluff; she was a New York girl born and bred and the worst day of her life was when, her mother selfishly forced her to move—during her senior year of high school, in the wake of her father’s death, no less—back to that hick-infested rat trap where she'd spent her childhood summers.
But now that her marriage to a new york high society heir has fallen apart in a very public, a pregnant Caroline decides to escape the gossipmongers with her nine-year-old daughter and head home to her mother, very embarrassing fashion, Ansley.
The Book of Summer: A Novel
. Bess’s grandmother and primary keeper of the book, and by the very last day of the very last summer at Cliff House, Ruby, always said Cliff House was a house of women, Bess will understand the truth of her grandmother’s words in ways she never imagined. The ocean, the wild roses on the dunes and the stunning Cliff House, perched atop a bluff in Sconset, Nantucket.
It’s not just memories of her family home Bess must face though, but also an old love that might hold new possibilities. In the midst of packing Bess rediscovers the forgotten family guest book. Bess must now put aside her complicated memories in order to pack up the house and deal with her mother, a notorious town rabble-rouser, who refuses to leave.
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