Haven Point: A Novel

A sweeping debut novel about the generations of a family that spends summers in a seaside enclave on Maines rocky coastline, for fans of Elin Hilderbrand, Beatriz Williams, and Sarah Blake.\r\n\r\n1944: Maren Larsen is a blonde beauty from a small Minnesota farming town, determined to do her part to help the war effort--and to see the world beyond her familys cornfields. As a cadet nurse at Walter Reed Medical Center, shes swept off her feet by Dr. Oliver Demarest, a handsome Boston Brahmin whose family spends summers in an insular community on the rocky coast of Maine.\r\n\r\n1970: As the nation grapples with the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, Oliver and Maren are grappling with their fiercely independent seventeen-year-old daughter, Annie, who has fallen for a young man they dont approve of. Before the summer is over a terrible tragedy will strike the Demarests--and in the aftermath, Annie vows never to return to Haven Point.\r\n\r\n2008: Annies daughter, Skye, has arrived in Maine to help scatter her mothers ashes. Maren knows that her granddaughter inherited Annies view of Haven Point: despite the wild beauty and quaint customs, the regattas and clambakes and sing-alongs, she finds the place--and the people--snobbish and petty. But Maren also knows that Annie never told Skye the whole truth about what happened during that fateful summer.\r\n\r\nOver seven decades of a changing America, through wars and storms, betrayals and reconciliations, Virginia Humes Haven Point explores what it means to belong to a place, and to a family, which holds as tightly to its traditions as it does its secrets.