New York Situations bestselling author Beatriz Williams brings us the blockbuster novel from the season-an electrifying postwar fable of love, class, power, and redemption collection among the inhabitants of the island off the brand new England coast .

In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite, secretive Winthrop Island being a schoolgirl in the margins of high society, still reeling from the increased loss of her father in the next World War. When her beautiful mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose about The Summer Wives: A Novel summer home on Winthrop overlooks the well-known lighthouse, Miranda’s catapulted into a heady ” new world ” of pedigrees and cocktails, status and pools. Isobel Fisher, Miranda’s new stepsister-all long hip and legs and world-weary bravado, engaged to a rich Island scion-is wanting to pull Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop culture.

But beneath the island’s patrician surface area, there are actually two clans: the summer families with their steadfast methods and quiet obsessions, as well as the functioning class of Portuguese anglers and domestic employees who earn their living over the drinking water and in the laundries of the summer houses. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged close friends, Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas, whose dad helps to keep the lighthouse with his mystical wife. In summer, Joseph assists his father in the lobster vessels, however in the fall he returns to Brown University, where he’s established to make something of himself. Since years as a child, Joseph’s enjoyed an intense, complex camaraderie with Isobel Fisher, so that as the summertime winds to its end, Miranda’s captured within a catastrophe which will shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish Miranda through the island for pretty much two decades.

Now, in the landmark summertime of 1969, Miranda earnings at last, like a renowned Shakespearean celebrity hiding an awful heartbreak. On its surface, the Island remains the same-determined to keep the outside globe from its shores, fiercely devoted to those who belong. But the previously powerful Fisher family is a shadow of itself, and Joseph Vargas has recently escaped the prison where he was incarcerated for the murder of Miranda’s stepfather eighteen years previously. What’s more, Miranda herself can be no more a naïve teenager, and she begins a brutal, inexorable search for justice for the person she once loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of the secrets that bind jointly the groups of Winthrop Island.