Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

The summer after her first year of college, Isobel "Belly" Conklin is faced with a choice between Jeremiah and Conrad Fisher, brothers she has always loved, when Jeremiah proposes marriage and Conrad confesses that he still loves her.

On a perfect July morning Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"-- the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. This morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Over the next 24 hours Elle will have to decide between the...

For the Hempsteads, two sisters who married two brothers and had three daughters each, summers were idyllic. The women would escape the city the moment school was out to gather at the family house on Lake Waseka. The lake was a magical place, a haven where they were happy and carefree. All of their problems drifted away as the days passed in sun-dappled contentment. Until the summer that changed everything. After an accidental drowning turned the...

One year after the lingering death of family patriarch Henry Maxwell, his autocratic widow, Emily, invites her scattered family to spend a last vacation together at their Lake Chautauqua summer home, which she unilaterally has decided to sell after decades of ownership by the family. In August, three generations converge at the house, among them Henry's spinster sister, Arlene, a retired schoolteacher; Meg, the oldest daughter, whose "train wreck...

When Cara Rutledge rents out her quaint beach house on Isle of Palms to Heather Wyatt for the entire summer, it’s a win-win by any standard: Cara’s generating income necessary to keep husband Brett’s ecotourism boat business afloat, and anxiety-prone Heather, an young artist who’s been given a commission to paint birds on postage stamps, has a quiet space in which to work and tend to her pet canaries uninterrupted. It isn’t long, however,...