All Summer Long

Home—it’s where you find yourself.

“I’d go anywhere with you.” Interior designer Olivia Ritchie meant every word she said to her husband, Nicholas Seymour, when they married. That was fourteen years ago, and now retired from university teaching, Nick is ecstatic to be returning to his boyhood home of Charleston, South Carolina.

Olivia tries to share his enthusiasm, but for a fourth-generation New Yorker, giving up Manhattan life and moving to the Lowcountry is a daunting prospect. She’s heartsick at leaving behind the city’s bustle and vibrancy, not to mention losing some of her wealthy New York clients. Nick has no idea how precarious their finances have become thanks to a run of her projects that fell through. Olivia can’t bring herself to tell him the truth, especially when the house they’ve purchased on Sullivans Island needs extensive—and expensive—work.

But in between settling in and adjusting to southern life, there are some dazzling diversions. Olivia’s billionaire clients Maritza and Bob invite her and Nick to join their quirky assortment of friends on trips that take them from the exclusive paradise of Necker Island to beautiful Nantucket to sultry Spain. Olivia’s perspective changes and expands as she sees what money can buy—and what it can’t. And over the course of one eventful summer, Olivia begins to open her mind to Sullivans Island’s undeniable magic, and to the surprising ways that a place can suddenly claim a heart.

Against a number of stunning backdrops, but rooted in the distinct charm of her beloved Lowcountry, Dorothea Benton Frank explores the nature of love, marriage, and belonging in a novel that is funny, thought-provoking, and irresistibly uplifting.