Beachcombers

Beachcombers is one of Nancy Thayer’s Nantucket novels, set on the Massachusetts island that has been her literary home for decades. Thayer has written more than thirty novels with Nantucket as their primary setting, and her readers come back to her for the consistent atmosphere of the place and for the multigenerational family dramas she handles with practiced skill.

The novel follows three sisters, Abbie, Emma, and Lily Fox, who reunite at their family home on Nantucket after years of being scattered across the world. Their father has just brought a new younger woman, Marina, into his life, and the sisters are returning to the island in part to assess the situation and in part to deal with the long buried family tensions that any reunion of the three of them inevitably brings to the surface. The summer that follows becomes a season of romance, complication, and the slow recognition of what each of the sisters actually wants from their lives.

Nancy Thayer handles the multigenerational family structure with care, giving each of the three sisters and their father and Marina enough perspective to feel like fully developed characters rather than plot pieces. The Nantucket setting is rendered with the kind of specific detail that only an actual island resident can produce. The summer rhythms of the place, with its tides and its tourists and its small year round community, give the novel its particular flavor.

What distinguishes Thayer from a lot of writers in her general territory is the affection she clearly feels for her setting and her characters. The Nantucket of her novels is a real place rendered with specific detail, not just a postcard backdrop, and her families are written with the kind of warmth that allows them to be flawed without being unlikeable.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, Beachcombers is a comfortable summer read that delivers the kind of warm island fiction her readers expect. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style and a good entry point into her wider Nantucket catalogue. Readers who enjoy Elin Hilderbrand’s Nantucket novels will find similar pleasure here, though Thayer’s voice is slightly quieter than Hilderbrand’s high gloss summer fiction. The three sisters dynamic at the heart of the novel gives it additional weight beyond the central romance plot.