Surfside Sisters

Keely Green left Nantucket with one goal: to become a writer. She has done it, too. She is a bestselling novelist in New York City, where her days include glamorous parties and conversation with the literary crowd. Her love life is less settled. She is seeing a charming pediatric surgeon who looks right on paper but does not feel like the one, and she has avoided ending things until he says he wants to settle down. Then her editor turns down her newest manuscript, and both her work and her relationship are suddenly in trouble.

The island she left starts to look like a refuge. But home comes with history. As girls, Keely and Isabelle were best friends who did everything together, until Keely's high school boyfriend, Tommy, came between them. Isabelle's betrayal still stings, and going back means seeing the family Isabelle and Tommy have built, a life that might once have been Keely's.

What finally sends her back is her mother, who sinks into a deep depression. Keely goes, though she dreads meeting her former friend again. Things get harder when she runs into Isabelle's older brother, Sebastian, on whom she has had a crush for years.

Over one summer, Keely has to face old mistakes if she hopes to find happiness in the place she has always thought of as home. Nancy Thayer, author of A Nantucket Wedding and Secrets in Summer, tells a warm story about friendship, forgiveness and finding out who you are.