The First Act of Summer

About the book

From the Costa-shortlisted, beloved author of All My Mothers, Joanna Glen

Is it ever too late to figure out who you were meant to be?

As children, Hester and Elias were inseparable. Every year, their families would spend the summer together at their beach huts on a wild and windswept sandbank, where the two of them never left each other’s side.

But childhood friendships can stretch and warp as you grow up, and in the summer of 1976, the year they turned 14, Hester did a terrible thing that would shatter both of their lives.

For her 60th birthday, Hester goes back to her family’s beach hut to hide from the husband she wants to leave and the daughters she’s never fully understood. It is here that she finally faces up to what she did that fateful summer, wondering whether it’s ever too late to become the person you were meant to be. And if there’s still a chance of finding Elias again…

From the Costa-shortlisted author of The Other Half of Augusta Hope, All My Mothers and Maybe, Perhaps, Possibly, this is a raw and sweeping novel about the power of a dark secret, the resilience of love and the possibility of redemption.