Status Updates From High Season

“She talks about secret parties, skinny-dipping at midnight, margaritas out on the balcony with people so impossibly famous that Nina has to double-check her mother has got their names right. Sometimes, Nina can feel the ghosts of them sipping aperitifs on the terrace, watching sunsets over the broad expanse of sea.”

“Like many of the transitions in Josie's life… the move was characterized by a flurry of hope and optimism followed by a shift to quiet fury and disappointment. They arrived in autumn to find the beaches empty, the village quiet, the flurry of high season stilled.”

“How… Nina had felt a bolt of guilt so intense that she had become obsessive about strange things. Hand-washing. Counting. Flicking light switches on and off. Believing that if she didn't track her steps in units of one hundred then some omnipotent force would take another member of her family away. Chewing each mouthful exactly twenty times until her jaw ached and she had no appetite left.”

Scene-setting and summer moodiness from the first line. A great opening page (and then some)

“There is a soft, sleepy light on the water.
Later, Nina will think of it as the color of rust. Sunlight through a bottle of sweet, dark rum. The very last embers of an almost-extinguished fire.”