New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams brings
us the blockbuster novel of the season—an electrifying
postwar fable of love, class, power, and redemption set
among the inhabitants of an island off the New England
coast . . .
In the summer of 1951, Miranda Schuyler arrives on elite,
secretive Winthrop Island as a schoolgirl from the
margins of high society, still reeling from the loss of
her father in the Second World War. When her beautiful
mother marries Hugh Fisher, whose summer house on
Winthrop overlooks the famous lighthouse, Miranda’s
catapulted into a heady new world of pedigrees and
cocktails, status and swimming pools. Isobel Fisher,
Miranda’s new stepsister—all long legs and world-weary
bravado, engaged to a wealthy Island scion—is eager to
draw Miranda into the arcane customs of Winthrop society.
But beneath the island’s patrician surface, there are
really two clans: the summer families with their
steadfast ways and quiet obsessions, and the working
class of Portuguese fishermen and domestic workers who
earn their living on the water and in the laundries of
the summer houses. Uneasy among Isobel’s privileged
friends, Miranda finds herself drawn to Joseph Vargas,
whose father keeps the lighthouse with his mysterious
wife. In summer, Joseph helps his father in the lobster
boats, but in the autumn he returns to Brown University,
where he’s determined to make something of himself. Since
childhood, Joseph’s enjoyed an intense, complex
friendship with Isobel Fisher, and as the summer winds to
its end, Miranda’s caught in a catastrophe that will
shatter Winthrop’s hard-won tranquility and banish
Miranda from the island for nearly two decades.
Now, in the landmark summer of 1969, Miranda returns at
last, as a renowned Shakespearean actress hiding a
terrible heartbreak. On its surface, the Island remains
the same—determined to keep the outside world from its
shores, fiercely loyal to those who belong. But the
formerly powerful Fisher family is a shadow of itself,
and Joseph Vargas has recently escaped the prison where
he was incarcerated for the murder of Miranda’s
stepfather eighteen years earlier. What’s more, Miranda
herself is no longer a naïve teenager, and she begins a
fierce, inexorable quest for justice for the man she once
loved . . . even if it means uncovering every last one of
the secrets that bind together the families of Winthrop
Island.
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