Sardinia: A Novel

The island was beautiful. The memories weren’t.

Fifteen years ago, eleven‑year‑old Sadie flew to Sardinia with her parents for what was meant to be a “lucky” family vacation: a cliffside villa, an infinity pool, the glittering Tyrrhenian Sea. Instead, under a howling wind and the pressure of a failing marriage, the week turned into a master class in quiet cruelty—ending with one night on a small boat that no one in the family has ever been willing to discuss.

Now Sadie is twenty‑three, a junior lawyer with a serious drinking habit and a court order to attend therapy after an incident at a bar. In Dr. Jackson’s immaculate Manhattan office, Sadie does what she’s always done: distracts, deflects, and performs, offering darkly funny anecdotes about that disastrous Sardinian holiday, while circling the one memory that still makes her throat close. But as the legal noose tightens and her therapist refuses to be charmed, the past stops cooperating. The island comes back in shards: her mother’s white‑knuckled cheer, her father’s swaggering entitlement, the Mistral screaming through the ravine, an anchor chain rattling in the dark. As past and present collide, Sadie is forced to confront what Sardinia really made of her—and how far a family will go to keep living inside its favorite lie.

Set between a luxury villa on a treacherous coastline and a claustrophobic New York present, Sardinia is a darkly funny, slow‑burn suspense about marriage as battleground, privilege as protection, and the dangerous stories we tell ourselves to live with what we’ve done.