The history of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, can be summed up in four words: rice, sea, golf, and hammocks. The rivers threading through coastal South Carolina created an ideal environment for cultivating rice, and by the mid-18th century, vast plantations were producing profitable crops and wealthy landowners. But those plantations also produced malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so the landowners sent their families to the seashore for the summer and built the first houses on Pawleys Island starting in 1822. The end of slavery doomed the rice culture, and the old plantations were sold to rich Northerners for hunting and fishing retreats. By the 1960s, many of the old plantations were turned into golf courses, reviving the economy. But the beating heart of Pawleys Island remains the rhythm of the sea and what one early visitor called "the only beach in the world."

Dorothea Benton Frank presents a refreshingly honest and funny novel about friendship, family, and finding happiness by becoming who you're meant to be. Catapulted from her home, her marriage and her children, artist Rebecca Simms has come to Pawleys Island, South Carolina, to hide herself from herself. Little does she know that on this “arrogantly shabby” family playground, she’ll encounter three people who will change her life: a wise and irresistible octogenarian who will pry her secrets from her, a gallery owner who caters to interior decorators and heaven save us, tourists, and a retired attorney from Columbia who’s complacent in her fat and sassy life until Rebecca’s stormy advent...

“The strong pull of friendship, the leisurely pace of a tiny, waterfront Southern town, and the steady buildup of romance help buoy Frank’s well-drawn, memorable characters” (Publishers Weekly) in this New York Times bestseller. Meet Linda Breland, single parent of two teenage daughters—one of whom is headed off to college. Between that and the married men, the cold New Jersey winters, her pinched wallet, and her ex-husband who married a beautiful, successful woman ten years younger than she is—let’s just say Linda has seen enough to fill a thousand pages. Now she’s bound for Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the magical landscape of her ancestors. Welcomed by the help of her advice-dispensing sister and an intriguing ex–investment banker turned restaurant owner, Linda slowly begins to find her way and realize that she, too, is entitled to a second chance....

They were Carolina Girls, the best in the world, and they came together in the mid-Sixties on Pawleys Island, where life began to mold them into the women they would later become. Each summer they would return to Pawleys to renew their friendship. The Carolinas in the turbulent Sixties, a time as different from the antebellum South as the Sixties were different from the modern South of today.

When ten-year-old Peter arrives at the beach for his week-long vacation, he pretty much knows what to expect. After all, his family has been coming to Pawleys Island for as long as any of them remember, so he quickly settles into their normal routine. But that routine is shattered in a flash when he witnesses a brutal fight in the middle of his first night there. Before he knows it, Peter is swept into a wild adventure that will test everything he thought he knew about this tiny coastal town as he races to discover who caused the fight . . . before the bad guy strikes again!