BONUS: This edition contains a Summer House discussion guide and an excerpt from Nancy Thayer's Island Girls.
Thirty-year-old Charlotte Wheelwright seems to have at last found her niche, running an organic gardening business on the island of Nantucket, thanks in large part to her spry grandmother Nona, who donated a portion of land on the family’s seaside compound to get Charlotte started. Though Charlotte’s skill with...

It all started the previous summer. Marc, his wife, and their two beautiful teenage daughters agreed to spend a week at the Meier's extravagant summer home on the Mediterranean. Joined by Ralph and his striking wife Judith, her mother, and film director Stanley Forbes and his much younger girlfriend, the large group settles in for days of sunshine, wine tasting, and trips to the beach. But when a violent incident disrupts the idyll, darker motivations...

Matt comes across photos of him as a child yet they seem unfamiliar; is it really him? He can't remember the clothes or the toys, and his sister Imogen is nowhere in the pictures. Since her childhood Imogen has loved the Summer House, a charming folly in the grounds of an ancient house on Exmoor and now she and her veterinary husband have the chance of buying. But her marriage is threatened when her husband refuses to live so far from his practice....

A family on vacation cares for a little yellow cat, which the children long to take home with them when they leave.

"Callie Weaver and her best friend, Olivia Dixon have finally done it: put their life savings into the beach house they admired through childhood summers, on the dazzling white sand of North Carolina's Outer Banks. They're going to buff the salt from its windows, paint its sun-bleached sidings, and open it as a bed-and-breakfast. Callie's too busy to think about her love life, but when she catches the attention of local heartthrob Luke Sullivan,...

A play about dominating mothers manipulating their daughters.

One novel, one play, nine shorter works originally published from 1944-1966, twelve notebook excerpts, and 133 letters from 1935-1970. Two serious ladies: A modernist cult-classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, and only novel by avant-garde literary star and wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles. Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, both upper-class women, embark on separate quests of salvation, ultimately descending into debauchery--...

Two serious ladies is a 1943 modernist novel by the American writer Jane Bowles. It follows two upper-class women, Christina Goering and Frieda Copperfield, as they descend into debauchery. Bowles' style is often described as singular. In the summer house is an absurd play, and she admirably proves the rule that some people do silly things at picnics. Plain pleasures: In this collection of short fiction, ranging from North Africa to South American,...