The Beach House

The Beach House

by Jane Green

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes

The Beach House

The Beach House

by Jane Green

Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged — 11 hours, 17 minutes

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Overview

From the author of Falling and Sister Stardust comes the New York Times bestseller about finding your place in the place you call home.

Ever since her life took an unexpected turn, Nan Powell has enjoyed living alone on the sun-drenched shores of Nantucket. At sixty-five, she's just as likely to be found at Windermere, her beach front home, as she is skinny dipping in her neighbor's pool. *But when the money she thought would last forever starts to dwindle, Nan decides to do something drastic to keep hold of her free-spirited life: open up Windermere to strangers.*

After placing an ad for summer rentals touting water views, direct access to the beach, and a sexagenarian roommate, Nan's once quiet house is soon full of noise, laughter, and the occasional bout of tears. Between her eclectic new tenants and the sudden return of her son, Nan gets a taste of what life is like when you have someone to care for besides yourself. But just as she starts to happily settle in to her new existence, the arrival of a visitor from her past threatens to turn everyone's lives upside down...

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

What begins as edgy and smart gets stuck in the sand in popular chick lit author Green's (Second Chance) soggy beach read. Richard and Daff separate after Richard has an affair, which plays havoc with their daughter, Jess. Bee and Daniel, who go to therapy to bridge their emotional gap, wind up facing the uncomfortable truth of what really separates them. Middle-aged Michael keeps finding all the wrong women, and Michael's dotty and endearing mom Nan, facing flagging finances, raises funds by letting rooms in her venerable Nantucket beach home, only to have to ward off ravenous developers. There's enough upheaval to keep the tale humming until the cast lands on Nan's doorstep, where, with unrelenting good humor and wisdom, the troubles with couples, families, kids, singles and sexual identity are predictably resolved before the Labor Day exodus. Unfortunately, the payoffs diminish as the story wears on. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

This is a heartwarming tale of how a land-rich but cash-poor 65-year-old widow saves her Nantucket home by taking in summer boarders. Green's (Second Chance) trademark assemblage of appealing characters-a recently separated father of two young daughters, a single mother of a teenager-gradually fill up Nan's home, and their interactions bring hope back into these strangers' lives. Even Nan is taken by surprise when a visitor brings more than just long-lost memories. [See Prepub Alert, LJ3/1/08.]


—Teresa Jacobsen

Kirkus Reviews

A Nantucket house sparks romance and mystery in the latest from Green (Second Chance, 2007, etc.). Windermere is a glorious beach house on the shores of Nantucket. The home has been the site of riotous parties, romance and tremendous loss. The Powell family has inhabited Windermere for generations. Nan Powell-a woman of a certain age-is the current occupant. Despite suffering the loss of her husband on Windermere's beach, Nan decided to stay put and raise her son, Michael, in Nantucket. Now alone in her large home, Nan refuses to downsize. She adores rambling around in her home and watching the developers drool over her nine acres of oceanfront property. As an aging widow, Nan has earned a reputation as a bit of an eccentric-this suits her just fine. Her cavalier attitude catches up with her when she finds out that all of her investments have tanked and she is out of cash. To make ends meet, Nan decides to let out rooms at Windermere. She dusts off the furniture and writes an ad. Woosh. A breath of fresh air enters the somewhat musty home as Nan welcomes her boarders. The boarders make up an odd lot: There's Daniel, newly out of the closet and estranged from his wife; Daff, a single mother trying to find herself and deal with an unruly teenage daughter; and Michael, Nan's son, a refugee from New York after an affair with his boss turns sour. The combination of Nan's meddling and Windermere's magic brings unexpected romance. As love blossoms all around her, Nan comes to terms with her future. Spending a few hours combing through the gardens and beaches of Green's Nantucket is a great way to make a long plane ride seem much shorter. And if you can't recall much of the plot after turning thelast page, so what?Neatly packaged beach diversion. Agent: Anthony Goff/David Higham Associates

From the Publisher

Green gives you a clear sense of Nantucket's weathered splendor and offers up a refreshing summertime getaway…best read on a deck chair somewhere.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“A sweetly memorable summer story, capturing the relaxing, renewing quality of life at the shore.”—New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Breezy…deeply appealing.”—Connecticut Post

“Green's best novel in years, a compelling, unputdownable read.”—Booklist


More Praise for the Novels of Jane Green

“Gripping and powerful.”—Emily Giffin, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“The perfect summer read.”―Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“A warm bath of a novel that draws you in…Green’s sympathetic portrayals…resonate.”—USA Today

“Warm, witty, sharp and insightful. Jane Green writes with such honesty and zing.”―Sophie Kinsella, New York Times bestselling author

“Her compelling tale reflects an understanding of contemporary women that’s acute and compassionate, served up with style.”―People

“The kind of novel you’ll gobble up at a single sitting.”—Cosmopolitan

“A smart, complex, character-driven read.”—The Washington Post

“Green’s novels consistently deliver believable, accessible, heartfelt, often heartwarming stories about real people, problems, and feelings.”—Redbook

OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile

The life changes of four couples could make for a fractured listening experience, but Cassandra Campbell's narration seamlessly unites all the characters. Her even delivery sweeps listeners into the story of strangers who, while sorting themselves out at Windermere, a Nantucket beach house, become family. Sixty-five-year-old Nan, facing financial ruin, revives when she takes in roomers who have surprising connections—to each other and to her past. Campbell's reading, though smooth, doesn't lack for full emotional explorations of characters, whether they’re divorcing, coming out, or falling in love. With equal aplomb she dramatizes the rages of a 13-year-old with newly divorced parents. Listeners will have a hard time turning off this guilty pleasure. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID: 2940169348750
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Publication date: 06/17/2008
Edition description: Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

The bike crunches along the gravel path, weaving around the potholes that could present danger to someone who didn't know the road like the back of their hand.

The woman on the bike raises her head and looks at the ski, sniffs, smiles to herself. A foggy day in Nantucket, but she has lived here long enough to know this is merely a morning fog, and the bright early-June sunshine will burn it off by midday, leaving a beautiful afternoon.

Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbor's house, where she has spent the last hour or so cutting the large blue mophead hydrangeas and stuffing them into the basket on the front of the bike. She doesn't really know these neighbors — so strange to live in the same house you have lived in for forty-five years, a house in a town where once you knew everyone, until one day you wake up and realize you don't know people anymore — but she has guessed from the drawn blinds and absence of cars they are not yet here, and they will not miss a couple of dozen hydrangea heads.

The gate to their rear garden was open, and she had heard around town they had brought in some super-swanky garden designer. She had to look. And the pool had been open, the water was so blue, so inviting, it was practically begging her to strip off and jump in, which of course she did, her body still slim and strong, her legs tan and muscled from the daily hours on the bike.

She dried off naturally, walking naked around the garden, popping strawberries and peas into her mouth in the kitchen garden, admiring the roses that were just starting, and climbing back into her clothes with a contented sigh when she was quite dry.

These are the reasons Nan has come to have a reputation for being slightly eccentric. A reputation she is well aware of, and a reputation she welcomes, for it affords her freedom, allows her to do the things she really wants to do, the things other people don't dare, and because she is thought of as eccentric, exceptions are always made.

It is, she thinks wryly, one of the beautiful things about growing old, so necessary when there is so much else that is painful. At sixty-five she still feels thirty, and on occasion, twenty, but she has long ago left behind the insecurities she had at twenty and thirty, those niggling fears: that her beauty wasn't enough, not enough for the Powell family; that she had somehow managed to trick Everett Powell into marrying her; that once her looks started to fade, they would all realize she wasn't anyone, wasn't anything, and would then treat her as she had always expected when she first married into this illustrious family... as nothing.

Her looks had served her well. Continue to serve her well. She is tall, skinny and strong, her white hair is glossy and sleek, pulled back in a chignon, her cheekbones still high, her green eyes still twinkling with amusement under perfectly arched brows.

Nan's is a beauty that is rarely seen these days, a natural elegance and style that prevailed throughout the fifties, but as mostly disappeared today, although Nan doesn't see it, not anymore

Now when she looks in the mirror she sees the lines, her cheeks concave under her cheekbones, the skin so thin it sometimes seems that she can see her bones. She covers as many of the imperfections as she can with makeup, still feels that she cannot leave her house without full makeup, her trademark scarlet lipstick the first thing she puts on every morning, before her underwear even, before her bath.

But these days her makeup is sometimes patchy, her lipstick smudging over the lines in her lips, lines that they warned her about in the eighties, when her son tried to get her to stop smoking, holding up photographs in magazines of women with dead, leathery skin.

"I can't give up smoking," she would say, frowning. "I enjoy it too much, but I promise you, as soon as I stop enjoying it, I'll give it up."

The day is yet to come.

Thirty years younger and she would never have dared trespass, swim naked in an empty swimming pool without permission. Thirty years younger and she would have cared too much what people thought, wouldn't have cut flowers or carefully dug up a few strawberry plants that would certainly not be missed, to replant them in her own garden.

But thirty years younger and perhaps, if she had dared and had been caught, she would have got away with it. She would have apologized, would have invited the couple back for a drink, and the husband would have flirted with her, would have taken the pitcher of rum punch out of her hand and insisted on pouring it for her as she bent her head down to light her cigarette, looking up at him through those astonishing green eyes, flicking her blond hair ever so slightly and making him feel like the most important man in the room, hell, the only man in the room, the wife be damned.

Thirty years younger and the women might have ignored her, but not, as they do now, because they think she's the crazy woman in the big old house on the bluff, but because they were threatened, because they were terrified that she might actually have the power to take their men, ruin their lives. And they were right.

Not that she ever did.

Not back then.

Of course there have been a few affairs, but Nan was never out to steal a man from someone else, she just wanted some fun, and after Everett died, after years of being on her own, she came to realize that sometimes sex was, after all, just sex, and sometimes you just had to take it where you could find it.

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