Lauren Willig - "The Summer Country"

"Powerful, emotional, beautiful, and historically fascinating, 'The Summer Country' is a simply breathtaking saga. This is the kind of book you fall into, that absorbs you for the entire time you are reading it and that after, haunts you.... long after."––M.J. Rose

Lauren Willig discusses The Summer Country. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.

At 57th Street Books

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About the book: Barbados, 1854: Emily Dawson has always been the poor cousin in a prosperous English merchant clan-- merely a vicar’s daughter, and a reform-minded vicar’s daughter, at that. Everyone knows that the family’s lucrative shipping business will go to her cousin, Adam, one day.  But when her grandfather dies, Emily receives an unexpected inheritance: Peverills, a sugar plantation in Barbados—a plantation her grandfather never told anyone he owned. 

When Emily accompanies her cousin and his new wife to Barbados, she finds Peverills a burnt-out shell, reduced to ruins in 1816, when a rising of enslaved people sent the island up in flames. Rumors swirl around the derelict plantation; people whisper of ghosts.

Why would her practical-minded grandfather leave her a property in ruins?  Why are the neighboring plantation owners, the Davenants, so eager to acquire Peverills? The answer lies in the past— a tangled history of lies, greed, clandestine love, heartbreaking betrayal, and a bold bid for freedom.

About the author: Lauren Willig is The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Ashford Affair and The English Wife, the RITA Award wining Pink Carnation series and two novels co-written with Beatriz Williams and Karen White—The Forgotten Room and The Glass Ocean. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband, preschooler, baby, and lots and lots of coffee.