The Solstice Summer: A Novel

From the author of Book-of-the-Month Club selection Women Like Us and Oprah magazine Notable Book Wild Girls, a wickedly smart portrait of wealth, desire, and ambition where the glamorous world of the ultra-rich is both alluring and treacherous.

On the longest, most intoxicating day of the year, desire breaks all the rules. During the summer solstice, three mismatched couples in a famously wealthy resort town are thrown off balance by sexual attraction and the quiet reckoning of who they’ve been and who they might still become.

Vanessa, a celebrated actress with a career in slow eclipse, returns to town hoping to revive a long-ago love. Annie, a former ballet star, arrives in flight from a shadowed past she refuses to name. Charlotte, the blueblood wife of an abusive tycoon, gets caught in the throes of surprising romantic choices. Meanwhile, Petra—mischievous, sharp-eyed, and slightly dangerous—watches it all unfold, chronicling the three women’s hidden desires even as she nudges events in unexpected directions. As love sparks between unexpected partners, regret over roads not taken collides with the fleetingness of time, giving this present-day drama the shimmer of a summer already slipping into memory.

Set amid opulent gardens and grand estates, The Solstice Summer is both a sensual comedy of manners and a wickedly funny takedown of the corporate titans of a new Gilded Age—an elite so rich and powerful it will stop at nothing to protect itself.