Lamar Public Library

When Maude Chambliss first arrives at Retreat, the seasonal home of her husband's aristocratic Yankee family, she is a young bride as lush and wild as the South Carolina Low Country from where she comes. Among the patrician men and women who reside in the summer colony on the coast of Maine, she is an outsider, certain, it seems, never to fit in. But over the course of many summers, Maude comes to love the colony. It is here, along the rocky coastline,...

Lilly Martin is racing from an oncoming blizzard when she skids into a hiker. Taking the injured man to a remote cabin, she discovers he is the handsome but shady Ben Tierney, who she flirted with the previous summer. Although attracted to Ben, Lilly must be on her guard. Five women have recently disappeared from the area, and Ben is the primary suspect. But as the storm intensifies and the roads become impassable, Lilly finds herself with nowhere...

In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family's vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family--her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating...

"Magic most definitely resides in the Maine summerhouse where the mysterious Madame Zoya has granted the innermost wishes of its visitors. Now, three women have come to this special place with one thing in common: a painful past they would each like to rewrite. Amy, who hides a heartbreaking loss behind her seemingly perfect marriage and family; Faith, a widow in her thirties whose deepest grief is for a man from years ago; and Zoe, an artist shunned...

Some people stay all summer long on the idyllic island of Belle Isle, North Carolina. Others come only for the weekends, and the mix between the regulars and "the weekenders" can sometimes make the sparks fly. Riley Griggs has a season of good times with friends and family ahead of her on Belle Isle when things take an unexpected turn. While waiting for her husband to arrive on the ferry one Friday afternoon, Riley is confronted by a process server...

"A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast. They're polar opposites. In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next...

"It used to be that Belly counted the days until summer, until she was back at Cousins Beach with Conrad and Jeremiah. But not this year. Not after Susannah got sick again and Conrad stopped caring. Everything that was right and good has fallen apart, leaving Belly wishing summer would never come. But when Jeremiah calls saying Conrad has disappeared, Belly knows what she must do to make things right again. And it can only happen back at the beach...

It is early evening when Hope Tantry arrives at the small cottage in Englands pastoral Lake District where her mother, Ally, spent the last years of her life. Ally-one of a close-knit group of women who called themselves the Wednesday Sisters-had used the cottage as a writers retreat, yet Hope knows little about her mothers time there. Traveling with Hope are friends Anna Page and Julie, first introduced as little girls in The Wednesday Sisters, now...

"What happens when best friends with nothing in common come together, fall apart, and fall in love? The Vacationers meets When Harry Met Sally..., from the author of Beach Read When Poppy met Alex, there was no spark, no chemistry, and no reason to think they'd ever talk again. Alex is quiet, studious, and destined for a future in academia. Poppy is a wild child who only came to U of Chicago to escape small-town life. But after sharing a ride home...