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Fortune's Rocks Series

This series delves into the tumultuous coming-of-age journeys of young women against the backdrop of societal conventions at the turn of the 20th century. The narrative plunges into the complexities of first loves, sexual awakenings, and the inevitable consequences of defying societal norms. Follow the protagonists as they navigate class prejudices and strive to redefine their lives after making catastrophic choices. It offers a powerful exploration of female eroticism, social tensions, and the resilience of the human spirit in the face of adversity.

Body Surfing
The pilot’s wife
Sea Glass
Fortunes Rocks

Recommended Reading Order

  1. Fortunes Rocks

    • 500 pages
    • 18 hours of reading

    On a beach in New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a young woman is drawn into a rocky, disastrous passage to adulthood. Olympia Biddeford is the only child of a prominent Boston couple—a precocious and well-educated daughter, alive with ideas and flush with the first stirrings of maturity. Her summer at the family's vacation home in Fortune's Rocks is transformed by the arrival of a doctor, a friend of her father's, whose new book about mill-town labourers has caused a sensation. Olympia is captivated by his thinking, his stature, and his drive to do right—even as she is overwhelmed for the first time by irresistible sexual desire. She and the doctor—a married man, a father, and nearly three times her age—come together in an unthinkable, torturous, hopelessly passionate affair. Throwing aside propriety and self-preservation, Olympia plunges forward with cataclysmic results that are the price of straying in an unforgiving era. Olympia is cast out of the world she knows, and Fortune's Rocks is the story of her determination to reinvent her broken life—and claim the one thing she finds she cannot live without. A meditation on the erotic life of women, an exploration of class prejudices, and most of all a portrayal of the throughts and actions of an unforgettable young woman, Fortune's Rocks is a masterpiece of narrative drama, beautifully written by one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.

    Fortunes Rocks1
    3.9

  2. Sea Glass

    • 366 pages
    • 13 hours of reading

    The year is 1929 and Honora Beecher and her husband, Sexton, are just settling into a new marriage and a cottage on the coast of New Hampshire. While Honora fixes up the derelict house and searches for bits of sea glass on the beach, Sexton risks everything they own to buy the house they both love. Along with millions of other Americans, he is blindsided by the stock market crash and finds himself penniless. The only work he can find is at a nearby mill, where a labour conflict is erupting into violence. Shaken by forces they scarcely understand, Honora and Sexton try to build a marriage and home while overwhelmed by passions of every kind. Writing with the power and immediacy that have made her novels bestsellers, Shreve unfolds interlocking lives, each with its own share of love, loss and challenge. This is another gripping and unforgettable story of the human heart from one of the most accomplished novelists of our time.

    Sea Glass2
    3.6

  3. The pilot’s wife

    • 304 pages
    • 11 hours of reading

    Who can guess what a woman will do when the unthinkable becomes her reality? From the bestselling author of THE WEIGHT OF WATER, this enormously gripping and powerfully wrought novel asks the questions we all have about ourselves and definitively places Anita Shreve among the ranks of the best novelists writing today. Being married to a pilot has taught Kathryn Lyons to be ready for emergencies, but nothing has prepared her for the late-night knock on her door and the news of her husband's fatal crash. As Kathryn struggles through her grief, she is forced to confront disturbing rumours about the man she loved and the life that she took for granted. Torn between her impulse to protect her husband's memory and her desire to know the truth, Kathryn sets off to find out if she ever really knew the man who was her husband. In her determination to test the truth of her marriage, she faces shocking revelations about the secrets a man can keep and the actions a woman is willing to take.

    The pilot’s wife3
    3.6

  4. Body Surfing

    • 264 pages
    • 10 hours of reading

    At the age of twenty-nine, Sydney has already been once divorced and once widowed. Trying to find her footing again, she has answered an advertisement to tutor the teenage daughter of a well-to-do couple as they spend a sultry summer in their oceanfront New Hampshire cottage. But when the Edwards' two grown sons, Ben and Jeff, arrive at the beach house, Sydney finds herself caught up in a destructive web of old tensions and bitter divisions. As the brothers vie for her affections, the fragile existence Sydney has rebuilt is threatened. With the subtle wit, lyrical language, and brilliant insight into real emotion that has led her to be called 'a supremely elegant anatomist of the human heart' (The Times), Shreve weaves a story about risk, family, and the supreme courage that it takes to love.

    Body Surfing4
    3.3