Beachcombers

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I hope you all had a happy, busy holiday season. I love this time of year, when I can curl up with a good book, a cup of hot chocolate, and our cat Callie. It’s even better if it’s raining or snowing, although I grew up in Kansas and have family in Kansas City, and this past week the roads in the Midwest were sheer ice, so I hope everyone is safe.

January is always a good time to look over past years, and at 81, I have quite a few past years to look over! My 38th novel Summer Light on Nantucket comes out this April. I’ve written a book a year and sometimes 2 a year when I wrote Christmas books. I want to tell you about my books and what was going on when I wrote them.

I often wrote novels about sisters, because I had a younger sister and three (three!) of my best friends are the middle sister of three sisters and some of my best girlfriends are like sisters.

Beachcombers is about three sisters, Abby, Emma, and Lily Fox, who return to their Nantucket home one summer to deal with the arrival of a new woman in their widowed father’s life.

The book begins with the three sisters and their mother walking by the ocean where they slowly search the sand for treasures left by the sea. Sometimes, they find beautiful shells. Sometimes they find, as I did, a pale blue glass bottle from a century ago.

Their mother tells her daughters, “The universe is always speaking to us. Sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more.”

But now their mother is gone, and the three sisters must cope with their own lives, learning what work they want to pursue, and what man they feel they could love, while at the same time monitoring their father’s relationship with the woman who has rented the cottage at the back of their property. . .and who seems interested in their father.

Marina Warren has come to Nantucket for the summer to recover from an enormous loss. She walks by the ocean, wondering, “What good am I on this earth? Why am I here?” She’s sophisticated and beautiful. The sisters worry for their widowed, carpenter father.

Lily thinks, “He was a margarita at a clambake. This woman looked like a martini at the opera.”

As the summer unfolds, the sisters rekindle their friendship with each other. They also find the very different paths their lives will take. They meet interesting men—which cause them interesting problems.

In 2009, when I was writing Beachcombers, my own life was full.

My beautiful friend Julie and her husband took us on their boat The Cricket on a sunny summer day. I joined a fund raiser for research for lung cancer with my friend Meryl Bralower, and I learned more about island crafts.

I’m working on a new book now, of course! I walk every day—well, almost every day. I enjoy the cold but I stay in if there’s ice. I’m reading every day, too. I think reading is what the month of January is meant for.

Happy Reading and Best Wishes to you all, Nancy