The author returns to her classic Southern setting in the Isle of Palms with the sequel to her novel The Beach House. She weaves together issues of class, women's rights, and domestic abuse set in the tumultuous South during the 1970s as she tells the story of Olivia, "Lovie" Rutledge, the mother from The Beach House. As Lovie sits on the porch of her charming beach house and looks out over the ocean, the old woman reflects on the difficult choices she made in many years earlier, during the summer that changed her life. In 1974, at thirty-nine years old, Lovie hosts a formal dinner party for her unappreciative husband in their lovely home in a neighborhood of privilege in Charleston. The following morning she takes her two children to a nearby barrier island where her family has a modest beach cottage. Behind closed doors, and exhausted from keeping up appearances, her husband's infidelity and his withering, disdainful looks, she can only find solace and happiness at the beach. But when a handsome biologist arrives to research the status of nesting turtles, a project that is Lovie's passion, she finds herself falling in love over the course of the summer, with devastating consequences. This novel is a tale of marriage, resilience, and one woman's private strength.