Heat Wave

Heat Wave 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 Carley Winsted, a young Nantucket widow whose husband Gus died unexpectedly on the family’s wedding anniversary. Carley is left to raise their two daughters alone, to figure out how to keep the family bed and breakfast that Gus had been managing, and to navigate the complicated grief that comes with losing a partner who was the central organizing presence in her life. The heat wave of the title points to both the literal August heat that the novel is set against and the emotional intensity that Carley has to push through across the months that follow.

The romance plot develops slowly across the novel as Carley begins to figure out what kind of life she is going to build now that Gus is gone. Wyatt Anderson, an old friend of Gus’s who has come to Nantucket for the summer, becomes part of Carley’s slow recovery in ways that complicate her grief and that the wider Winsted family has its own opinions about. Nancy Thayer handles the romantic plot with the kind of care that grief novels require, refusing to rush Carley through her loss and refusing to suggest that any new relationship can simply replace what she had with Gus.

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. The bed and breakfast plot gives the novel its practical grounding, with the actual work of running a small Nantucket business providing the daily structure that Carley has to maintain even as her interior life is in upheaval.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, Heat Wave is one of her more emotionally weighted novels. For new readers, this 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.