Anne Rivers Siddons

"Every August, four women would gather together to spend a week at the beach, renting a new house each year. The ritual began when they were in their twenties and their husbands were in medical school, and became a mainstay of every summer thereafter. Their only criteria was oceanfront and isolation, their only desire to strengthen their far-flung friendships. They called themselves the Girls of August. But when one of the Girls dies tragically, the...

Growing up, the only place tomboy Thayer Wentworth felt at home was at her summer camp - Camp Sherwood Forest in the North Carolina Mountains. It was there that she came alive and where she met Nick Abrams, her first love...and first heartbreak. Years later, Thayer marries Aengus, an Irish professor, and they move into her deceased grandmother's house in Atlanta, only miles from Camp Edgewood on Burnt Mountain where her father died years ago in a...

Finding the family she has always longed for through her marriage to Lewis, Anny vows alongside her new friends that they will live together in old age rather than enter assisted-living facilities, a promise that is tested in the wake of painful challenges.

An ecologically aware woman battles her land-developer husband over the future of the island she inherited off South Carolina. He wants to build houses, she wants to preserve the island's habitat with its marshes, ponies and Gullah communities of former slaves.

When Catherine Gaillard finally ends her self-imposed isolation in Tennessee for a trip to Italy, she finds that the travel transforms her, and her liberation threatens her husband.

Lucy Bondurant Chastain Venable comes to live with her cousin's family in the great house on Peachtree Road, and the story of astonishing love and hate between a man and a woman begins.

Reunited with her beloved college chums after years of separation, Kate Abrams, now a successful interior designer, must face the many bitter truths of her own past.

Andy Calhoun comes back to the Old South with her small daughter, but her newfound happiness is threatened when her friend Tom Dabney opposes a nearby nuclear arms plant.