The Island House

The Island House is one of Nancy Thayer’s Nantucket novels, built around the central premise of a Nantucket house that the various central characters’ lives are organized around across one season. The island house setting provides the structural anchor for the wider plot, with the romantic, family, and community dynamics that Thayer’s fiction reliably delivers unfolding against the constant backdrop of the house and the wider Nantucket setting.

Thayer has written more than thirty novels with Nantucket as their primary setting. The Nantucket of her novels is a real place rendered with specific detail, with the summer rhythms of the island, the small year round community, and the seasonal influx of summer visitors providing the framework that her plots reliably work within.

For longtime Nancy Thayer fans, The Island House is a comfortable summer read. For new readers, the novel is a fair introduction to her style.