Summer Island
Book Overview
- First published
- 21 Oct 2008
- Reading order
- Not yet set
- Available as
- Format
- eBook
- Length
- 399 pages
- Published
- 10 Jul 2025
- Publisher
- Macmillan
- ISBN
- 978-1035045969
Trope TagsPossible spoilers
Warning TagsPossible spoilers
Main Love InterestsPossible spoilers
About This Book
From the multi-million copy bestselling author of The Women, The Four Winds and The Nightingale, Summer Island is a poignant, warm and tender novel about a mother and daughter–the complex ties that bind them, the past that separates them, and the healing that comes with forgiveness.
Years ago, Nora Bridge walked out on her marriage and left her daughters behind. She has since become a famous radio talk-show host and newspaper columnist beloved for her moral advice. Her youngest daughter, Ruby, is a struggling comedienne who uses her famous mother as fuel for her bitter, cynical humour.
When the tabloids unearth a scandalous secret from Nora’s past, their estrangement suddenly becomes dramatic. Nora is injured in an accident and a glossy magazine offers Ruby a fortune to write a tell-all about her mother. Under false pretences, Ruby returns home to take care of the woman she hasn’t spoken to for almost a decade.
Nora insists they retreat to Summer Island, to the lovely old house on the water where Ruby grew up, a place filled with childhood memories of love and joy and belonging. There Ruby is also reunited with her first love and his brother. Once, the three of them had been best friends, inseparable. Until the summer that Nora had left and everyone’s hearts had been broken . . . .
Book Overview
- First published
- 21 Oct 2008
- Reading order
- Not yet set
- Available as
- Format
- Audiobook
- Length
- 10 hours
- Published
- 21 Oct 2008
- Publisher
- Brilliance Audio
- Narration
- Solo narration
- Narrators
- Joyce Bean
Trope TagsPossible spoilers
Warning TagsPossible spoilers
Main Love InterestsPossible spoilers
About This Book
Thirty-four year old Ruby Bridge is a not-too-successful comedienne who uses her mother, a nationally-syndicated "moral and spiritual counselor" as the main fodder for her cynical, rather bitter humor. Her mother Nora, long divorced from Ruby's father, is a woman whose past is just about to catch up with her—in the form of blackmail by a former lover.
After an accident (an attempted suicide?) Ruby returns to care for her stricken mother—bitterly resenting the fact that once again her mother's life has colonized hers. When she is approached by a publisher to write a biography of her mother, Ruby is desperate for the princely sum offered. Yet her research into her mother's past reveals a woman very different from the one Ruby expected. And what began as "mommy dearest" ends as a love story—not only between mother and daughter, but involving two very different men who play a key role in linking the past to the present.
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