The first Sarah MacLean contemporary novel
Coming 2025
THESE SUMMER STORMS
July 8, 2025
A razor-sharp and deliciously clever novel about a wealthy and dysfunctional New England family’s long-overdue reckoning with hidden desires, destructive secrets…and one week that threatens to tear them apart.
Alice isn't like the other Storm siblings. While the rest stayed to battle for their parents' approval, attention, and untold billions, she left, building her own life beyond the family’s name and influence. Nothing could induce her to come back, except the shocking death of her larger-than-life father. Now back on the family’s private island off the Rhode Island coast, she plans to keep her head down, pay the last of her respects, and leave the minute the funeral is over.
Unfortunately, her father had other plans. The eccentric, manipulative patriarch left his widow and their grown children a final challenge--an inheritance game designed to humiliate, devastate, and unravel the Storm family in ways both petty and life-altering. The rules of the game are clear: stay on the island for one week, complete the tasks, receive the inheritance.
Every corner of the sprawling old house is bursting dysfunctional chaos: Her older sister’s secret love affair. Her brother’s incessant mansplaining. Her sister-in-law’s unapologetic greed. Her mother’s penchant for stirring up competition between her children. And all under the stern, watchful gaze of Jack Dean, her father’s enigmatic, unfairly good-looking second-in-command. It will be a miracle if Alice manages to escape the week unscathed.
A story about the transformative power of grief, love, and family, this luscious novel is at once wildly sexy and surprisingly tender, exploring past secrets, present truths, and futures forged in the wake of wild summer storms.