Time for a fun announcement that I’ve been sitting on for a while! My editor at Guideposts reached out in May to ask if I’d consider writing a contemporary beach read for them.

Now, the question came right as I was dealing with my cancer diagnosis, so there was a lot up in the air. Would I be able to write as quickly as normal? Or quickly enough, anyway? Would I be able to get it to them this summer? For that matter, when my editor reached out, the line they wanted it for wasn’t yet green-lit, so there was a lot of “maybe” involved.

She told me what they were looking for, though, so I spent a weekend with the comparable title they’d named, then some time brainstorming how I could deliver the “what they want” with something unique and “me.”

I decided right off the bat that I wanted to set this book in the Outer Banks, this time in the stretch I know best, between Avon and Buxton on Hatteras Island. I decided a bookshop would be a fun setting, in part because visiting the local bookstores down there, on both Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands, are always one of the highlights of a beach trip for me. And so I pitched The Island Bookshop, and my editor and team were very enthusiastic. The project got the official go-ahead, I turned in a synopsis…then there was a bit of delay on the contract itself, so I’m only just now able to share. But excited to do so, nevertheless!

The Island Bookshop is mostly a contemporary about Kennedy Marshall, who has to drop everything with her very-cool job as a rare book expert for the Library of Congress in D.C. to rush home to Avon, NC when her sister, Jackie, falls off the ladder to the attic of their family bookstore and gets a serious concussion and traumatic brain injury. Kennedy usually avoids her hometown, not because she doesn’t love it there, but because when she’s there, it’s too hard to remember that she’s only supposed to be the friend of Wes Armstrong, their next-door neighbor and the guy she’s been trying not to love ever since he chose her best friend over her in high school. Spending longer than a week in the beach town is the last thing she wants to do–but Jackie’s injuries are severe, and abandoning her and the store they inherited from their grandmother a year ago isn’t an option. Especially when she finds what had sent Jackie down the attic ladder too fast–a box of first edition children’s books and the deed to the house that became the bookshop…made out to a name none of them has ever heard before.

Cue the light timeslip element, where we jump back to 1938 and meet Ana Horvat, who has just immigrated from Dalmatia (now Croatia, Italy at the time) to escape Mussolini’s persecution. She arrives in Avon looking for her husband, Marko, who had come ahead of her to find the perfect place for them and their coming child. Marko, however, has signed onto a weeks-long fishing trip, so Ana has to find her own place as she waits for him to return. She’s blessed to find a friend quickly…but not everyone is eager to welcome a “foreigner” with strange ideas about teaching the island children other languages through various-language versions of The Secret Garden–the very way she learned English as a girl. All she wants is a place to belong–but can they really find it in this tight-knit island community, where it’s so obvious that they’re different?

So, yeah. We’ve got classic literature. A bookstore. A heroine with the coolest job ever (I mean, right??). Friends-to-more. Some deep family drama. The pull of family and dreams that clash…and of course, a gorgeous setting, full of sandy beaches, the occasional tropical storm, and lots of mood.

I’ve already finished writing it and have turned it in, so it’s a little funny that I can only now announce it, but still so fun! It’s currently set to come out next May from Guideposts. Stay tuned for things like cover reveals and pre-order info!