Beach House (Bockoven)

The beach house is a peaceful haven, a place to escape everyday problems. Here, three families find their feelings intensified and their lives transformed each summer. When thirty-year-old Julia, mourning the death of her husband, decides to sell the Santa Cruz beach house they owned together, she sets in motion a final summer that will change the lives of all the families who rent it year after year. Teenaged Chris discovers the bittersweet joy of first love. Maggie and Joe, married sixty-five years, courageously face a separation that even their devotion cannot prevent. The married woman Peter yearns for suddenly comes within his reach. And Julia ultimately finds the strength to rebuild her life-something she once thought impossible. With equal measures of heartbreak and happiness, bestselling author Georgia Bockoven's unforgettable novel tells of the beauty of life and the power of love, and speaks to every woman who has ever clung to a child or loved a man.

Over the course of one year, in a charming cottage by the sea, eight people will discover love and remembrance, reconciliation and reunion, beginnings and endings in this unforgettable sequel to Georgia Bockoven's The Beach House and Another Summer. Alison arrives at the beach house in June to spend a month with her restless grandson before he leaves for his freshman year in college. Over a decade before, Alison lost her beloved husband, and has faced life alone ever since. Now she discovers a new life, and possible new love. August brings together four college friends facing a milestone. Across summer's final days, they share laughter, tears, and love-revealing long-held secrets and creating new and even more powerful bonds. World-class wildlife photographer, Matthew, and award-winning war photographer, Lindsey, arrive at the beach house in January, each harboring the very real fear that it will mark the end of their decade-long love affair. Alone in the house's warm peace, they will be forced to truly look at who they are and what they want, discovering surprising truths that will change their lives forever.

In her delightful new novella, Georgia Bockoven brings readers back to the beloved beach house and the charming cottage next door…What should have been the best day in Diana Wagnor's twenty-nine years easily turns into the worst when her job is downsized, she discovers her fiancé in bed with her best friend, and she watches her cherished grandmother's house burn to the ground. Clearly, it's time to start over and get out of Topeka, Kansas, where she's spent her whole life. But what should she do? And how does she ever trust herself in another relationship when her one indisputable skill seems to be picking the wrong man? Diana finds her answers at the cottage next door to the beach house with the help of a tall, sculptured, soft-spoken Californian, and a heart-shaped piece of sea glass.