Diana’s glamorous, sophisticated, single-lady life is miles away from Daisy’s simpler existence.

While Daisy’s making dinner, Diana’s making plans to reorganize corporations. While Daisy’s driving carpools, Diana is chairing meetings. While Daisy tries to identify the root of her dissatisfaction, she’s also receiving misdirected emails meant for a woman named Diana Starling, whose email address is just one punctuation mark away from her own. But her teenage daughter can be a handful her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Big Summer comes another timely and deliciously twisty novel of intrigue, secrets, and the transformative power of female friendship, set on beautiful Cape Cod.ĭaisy Shoemaker can’t sleep. Lesley is the author of nine novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, The Swan Princess, The Vermilion Bird, and The Shattered Drum ), a historical fiction series set during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible, and Song of the Siren, published in 2019. Better yet, she does it against the backdrop of a Barbados so beautifully realized that you will feel that you can smell the sugar cane burning and hear the singing carried on the wind.Ĭ.

In The Summer Country (William Morrow, 2019), Lauren Willig nimbly balances Emily’s story against her grandfather’s, interweaving the stories of three families across two timelines into a seamless whole. How many other secrets did her grandfather conceal? But Emily soon begins to wonder about the neighbors’ motives, as well as the history of the plantation. Emily persists, only to find the estate in ruins and the family next door eager to take her in. When Emily expresses the desire to see Peverills for herself, the Turners explicitly warn her away. Turner-reputed to be the wealthiest man in Barbados-is of African descent and neither he nor anyone else in his family seems to think much of the English visitors. In the company of her cousins Adam and Laura, Emily embarks on a sailing vessel for the West Indies. Emily, an English vicar’s daughter, has long been the “poor relation” of her merchant family, but the bigger surprise is that her grandfather never once mentioned the existence of this property, Peverills. When Emily Dawson inherits a plantation in Barbados from her grandfather, Jonathan Fenty, in 1854, she is not quite sure what to make of the bequest.

That Summer by Lauren Willig