Blue House: A Novel

From the USA Today bestselling author of Little One comes a striking new novel about a young woman’s return to her childhood summer home in the Outer Banks, only to find it on the verge of collapse and reminders of its dark history looming around every corner, perfect for readers of Charlotte McConaghy and Miranda Cowley Heller. 

Willow Crain should know better than to question the will of the ocean. For seventeen summers, her family made the long drive to their rickety, salt-soaked Hatteras Island home, Blue House, where they would spend two weeks with her mother’s best friend and her two children. It was a time of warm sand and cool ocean water, midnight swims and water-logged paperbacks, the roar of the Atlantic always in the background. While Blue House was reserved for other renters the rest of the year, for those two languid weeks, it was all theirs. That is, until that final summer, when tragedy strikes and Willow’s life is changed forever. 

Now, at 32, Willow still lives in the shadow of the house. Since taking ownership in her early twenties, she has managed rentals from afar, hiring a local company to handle the endless list of repairs but never visiting herself. Each season, though, the ocean has crept closer, and now the home’s very foundation is at risk. 

With locals swearing the summer ahead will be Blue House’s last, Willow knows it’s time to go back. But saying goodbye is far more complicated than she ever could have anticipated, especially when a ghost from her past returns and forces her to confront what really happened all those years ago.