28 Summers

When Mallory Blessing is dying, she leaves her son, Link, a last request: call the number written on a slip of paper in her desk drawer. It is the late spring of 2020, and the person who answers is Jake McCloud, whose wife, Ursula DeGournsey, is the frontrunner in the coming presidential election. Link cannot imagine how his mother and Jake could possibly know each other.

The story then goes back to the summer of 1993. Mallory has just inherited a beachfront cottage on Nantucket from her aunt, and she agrees to host her brother Cooper's bachelor party. Jake, a friend of Cooper's from college, is among the guests. He and Mallory form a bond that lasts through marriages, children, and Ursula's rise to national prominence, right up until Mallory learns she does not have long to live.

The novel takes its inspiration from the classic film Same Time Next Year, which Mallory and Jake watch together every summer. It follows an affair limited to one weekend a year and looks at both the pain and the romance of that arrangement, and at how it complicates and enriches their lives and the lives of the people close to them. Author Elin Hilderbrand is known for her Nantucket-set novels, and she also wrote Summer of '69.