Our Last Vineyard Summer

From the “great storyteller” (Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society) Brooke Lea Foster, comes a captivating historical fiction novel set in 1965 and 1978 about a graduate student who returns with her sisters to their family’s summer estate on Martha’s Vineyard and begins to unravel old family secrets.

After suffering through her first year of graduate school at Columbia following her senator father’s death, Betsy Whiting is hoping to spend the summer with her boyfriend…and hopefully end the summer as his fiancée. Instead, her mother—a longtime feminist and leader in the women’s rights movement—calls Betsy and her sisters back home to Martha’s Vineyard, announcing that they need to sell their beloved summer house to pay off their father’s debts.

When Betsy arrives on the island a week later, she must reckon with her strained familial relationships, a long-ago forbidden romance, and the complicated legacy of her parents, who divided the family even as they did good for the world.

Following a dual timeline between 1965 and 1978, and filled with the vibrant, sunlit nostalgia of the cherished New England vacation setting, Our Last Vineyard Summer poignantly captures two generations of women navigating grief, sisterhood, and female friendship while trying to find the courage to stand up for what they believe in—and the strength to decide if the home they once loved is worth saving.