We chat with New York Times bestseller Beatriz Williams about The Beach At Summerly, which is a ravishing summer read, taking readers back to a mid-century New England rich with secrets and Cold War intrigue.
Hi, Beatriz! Welcome back! How have the past 18 months been for you since we last spoke?
Well, thank you for asking! The publishing business is as full of plot twists as any good thriller, so it’s fair to say I’ve experienced a few highs and lows and unexpected turns. I didn’t send out a solo book last summer, so I really relished the release of my latest collaborative novel with Karen White and Lauren Willig, The Lost Summers of Newport, complete with fun-packed book tour and a week on the New York Times bestseller list. So I always remind myself how lucky I am do to what I love for a living, what a privilege it is to sit with my laptop and coffee and make stories, and here we are with a brand new summer and a brand new book.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
As a child growing up in the Seattle suburbs, I was enormously fortunate to have parents who taught and encouraged me to read from a very young ago, and spent most of their very limited leisure budget on books, opera tickets, and annual family vacations to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. (Over the years, I got to know the Ashland KOA like my own neighborhood.) So I grew up immersed in stories and storytelling in lots of different forms, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to create my own. And as a bonus, I have this incredibly deep well of inspiration to draw from!
Were there any authors that particularly inspired you, or did you have any important mentors that helped you on your journey?
In my senior year of college, I discovered Patrick O’Brian and found myself chain-reading his novels, usually when I was supposed to be studying. They’re set in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, and even though the protagonists are men and the action revolves around naval warfare, I couldn’t put them down. O’Brian immerses us so thoroughly in this world, it feels like home. I had never experienced historical fiction like this before—impeccably authentic yet never creaky, lapidary detail, seamless voice, characters that were true to their time, larger than life yet so essentially human, literary yet addictively page-turning. It was the difference between learning French from a textbook and being dropped into France, and it’s been my blueprint for how to write historical fiction, even though our subjects and voice are so different.
Your latest novel, The Beach At Summerly, is out June 27th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Cold War, New England summer
What can readers expect?
In this novel, we return to Winthrop Island, the fictional setting for The Summer Wives that was loosely inspired by a discreet, exclusive summer enlave in Long Island Sound called Fishers Island. The Second World War has just ended and among the residents arriving on Winthrop for the summer months is a Soviet spy, whose presence alters the course of the life of Emilia Winthrop, the daughter of the caretaker for the estate of the wealthy Peabody family. So it’s really a merging of the worlds of my Cold War thriller Our Woman in Moscow and the beachy New England romance and family drama of The Summer Wives, as Western society comes to grips with the realization that, having just vanquished Hitler, we’ve got to summon up the physical and mental resources to take on Stalin.
Where did the inspiration for The Beach At Summerly come from?
I’ve been obsessed with the early years of the Cold War for some time, and a couple of years ago I came across an article about a woman in England who’d paid a visit to a Soviet spy she’d helped to put in prison decades earlier—a housewife who’d moved into the neighborhood when she was a teenager, befriended her and her mother, forged a real bond until MI5 turned up and asked their help in trapping this woman who they suspected of operating a radio to transmit classified information to the Soviet Union. I loved so many things about this story—the coming of age drama, the conflict of loyalties, the sense of betrayal on both sides, the quest for closure years later. That moment when the tide of history enters our lives and forces us to make difficult choices, to sacrifice our personal longings for duty; the ways in which these profound experiences shape our lives and our characters, how we deal with the aftereffects of that trauma—that’s my narrative sweet spot.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Well, first of all, Emilia is a type of character I love to write—someone caught in an ambiguous social space, trying to figure out who she really is and what she wants from life. She’s a descendant of one of the island’s original English settlers, her family’s farmed on Winthrop for centuries, but they’re now caretakers for the wealthy northeastern families who have taken over the island for their own summer leisure. I loved exploring the relationship between the Winthrops and the Peabodys, and specifically Emilia’s relationship to the Peabody boys, with whom she grew up and has some complicated romantic history, and their aunt, Olive Rutherford, a liberal and liberated woman who spies Emilia’s potential. Then there’s the added layer of exploring Emilia again as an adult, eight years after the events of that summer, to see how she’s matured and help her reach some kind of internal resolution. The Soviet spy was another challenge. It’s a real flex of the writing muscles to unpick the interior of someone motivated by a flawed ideology, someone deeply intelligent but psychologically dependent on a certain set of beliefs, who will rationalize any evil acts done in its name, any rot at its core—all without ever entering directly into this character’s point of view. Of course, I have to admit, it’s also a huge pleasure to bring back characters I’ve loved writing in other books—in this case, Sumner Fox, the FBI agent from Our Woman in Moscow, who turns up on Winthrop and overturns everybody’s peace and quiet!
What’s next for you?
Something a little different, actually! My next solo book (scheduled for summer 2024) is a big, juicy love story that takes place on Winthrop Island in the present day with a much more contemporary vibe, introducing new characters and some descendants of those from earlier books, not to mention a special cameo from Emilia in her late nineties. You might say it’s packed with mini-epilogues of the Monk and Peabody families! But woven into all that is a narrative that takes place in Cairo in 1952, so the historical fiction fans get their sauce as well, don’t worry. And the next fabulous Willig, White and Williams collaboration is due out a few months after that, also set in the present day with some historical touchpoints. So there’s lots in the pipeline and I’m looking forward to sharing all the details.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
For summer—well, any time, really!—I love a book that’s both smart and fun, and I adored the unexpected pleasure of This Bird Has Flown, by Susannah Hoffs. I reviewed this book for the New York Times, and I have to admit, I was skeptical to be handed a first novel written by a celebrity (Hoffs, as you might remember, is a musician best known as the lead singer for the Bangles). But from the opening scene, the characters and prose delighted me. It’s witty and irreverent and exuberant, packed with sex and and plot twists and sly allusions both literary and musical, and it vaulted Hoffs right into my list of dream dinner party guests.
