About This Book
Sam's life looks perfect on paper — the right fiancé, the right career, the right timeline — until a weekend at her family's Long Island beach house unravels all of it. When her first love reappears next door, guitar and all, she's forced to reckon with a version of herself she thought she'd left at seventeen. Same Time Next Summer is a romance about the gap between the life you've built and the life you actually want, and the terrifying moment when those two things can no longer coexist.
Annabel Monaghan writes with a light, wry hand that makes the emotional stakes sneak up on you. The dual-timeline structure — present-day Sam alongside her teenage summers — is deployed with real skill, each past scene recontextualizing the present in ways that feel earned rather than mechanical. The prose is sharp and funny without deflecting from genuine feeling, and Monaghan excels at the small, specific details that make a place feel lived-in and a relationship feel real. Readers who find most beach reads too breezy will find this one has more weight to it than the cover suggests.
