Three Hamptons Based Novels to Enjoy in Fall 2017

Take a gander at these three Hamptons novels you can enjoy this fall.: Water Baby by Susan Israelson, Holiday in the Hamptons by Sarah Morgan, and Violet Rose: The Encroaching Sea by Elizabeth Cooke.

Sarah Morgan is known for smart, sophisticated writing imbued with her trademark humor and sensuality. Her latest novel, Holiday in the Hamptons, is sure to thrill her many fans. The novel carries on where Morgan’s From Manhattan with Love trilogy left off by further exploring the amusing trials and tribulations of life and love in the big city…and away. The novels protagonist, Felicity “Fliss” Knight, is young, single and living in Manhattan. As co-owner of Bark Rangers—a successful dog-walking business—with her identical twin, Harriet, Fliss has the freedom, and the means, to make sure she never has to answer to, or put up with, anyone she doesn’t want to, including her ex-husband, Seth Carlyle, who just moved into her neighborhood. When Fliss’s grandmother suffers an injury, Fliss runs off to the Hamptons to care for her in order to get out of the City and to eliminate any chance of running into Seth. So when she runs into Seth, who recently purchased a Hamptons home, she does what any responsible woman would do—she pretends to be her twin sister. Seth is aware of this, but for the first time in 10 years, Fliss isn’t actively avoiding him. He uses this subterfuge to his advantage, slowly getting close enough to peel away the layers of Fliss’s traumatic past, persuading her to confront the demons she has been running away from for the past decade.

Elizabeth Cooke, an award-winning author who lived on the East End for many years—including a 30-year stint on the executive committee of the Westhampton Free Library—has recently published her novel Violet Rose: The Encroaching Sea. The book is the first volume of The Rose Trilogy and is set in Westhampton Beach. As the novels subtitle suggests, the ocean itself is a metaphor for the love/hate and turbulent relationships in the lives of the characters as malevolent storms beset them, both in tempests of weather and anguish of the heart. Violet Rose depicts the palpable animosity that frequently exists between summer visitors and local residents in a quiet resort town.

In 2012, Susan Israelson, of East Hampton, submitted the prologue to her now published novel, Water Baby, to the Dan’s Papers Literary Prize for Nonfiction. It was a memoir at the time, which later morphed into the novel—one that landed her the distinction of being the only self-published author at this year’s Authors Night for the East Hampton Library. Water Baby, the story of 20-year-old Ali Abrams’s coming of age in 1960s Fire Island and Manhattan, is a hilarious, brutally honest tale of breaking hearts and rules, about looking for love in all the wrong places and finding oneself along the way. From the sun-soaked beaches of Fire Island to cutthroat Madison Avenue, Water Baby is a sparkling New York story steeped in glamour and sixties counterculture. Israelson will be reading at BookHampton in East Hampton on Saturday, October 14 from 5–7 p.m.

All of these exciting books and more can be found at your local bookstore.