SUMMER ISLAND

Celeste Hartwell has spent thirty years telling America how to love their families. She just never told her own daughters the truth.

As the beloved host of a nationally syndicated call-in show, Celeste has built a career on hard-won wisdom and warm, unwavering honesty. But when a tabloid unearths a devastating secret from her past, one she buried for forty years, her carefully built world begins to collapse.

Her youngest daughter, Wren, a struggling stand-up comedian, has spent nearly a decade turning her mothers abandonment into bitter, crowd-pleasing punch lines. She hasnt spoken to Celeste in eight years. So when a glossy magazine offers Wren a fortune to write the ultimate tell-all, she says yes without hesitation, right up until she learns her mother has been seriously injured. Under the guise of playing a devoted daughter, Wren returns home to gather material for the story that could finally settle old scores.

Celeste insists they recover together on Summer Island, in the weathered house on the water where Wren spent every golden childhood summer, and where her first love, and his brother, once made her feel completely, unshakably known. Now grown, both men still live on the island, and old feelings resurface faster than Wren can outrun them.

As the deadline creeps closer and the article Wren set out to write becomes something else entirely, she starts to see her mother, and herself, with new eyes. The woman shes spent years hating is witty, wounded, and desperate for a second chance. But is Wren brave enough to put down the pen long enough to actually forgive her, and to let herself be loved in return?

A story about the families were born into, the ones we build for ourselves, and the courage it takes to finally tell the truth, *Summer Island* is a heartfelt, funny, and deeply moving novel about mothers, daughters, first loves, and the long way home.