Book
The Island Bookshop
Contemporary Romance with a Historical Thread
AVAILABLE NOW!
Surprise!
While I’ve known that The Island Bookshop would be coming out this summer, I wasn’t honestly sure when…until it arrived on my doorstep before I’d even seen the cover, LOL. So instead of my usual cover reveal and pre-order, you just get to learn about it NOW, all at once, and can snap it up now too, either directly from me or from Guideposts! (Paperback will be available wide at other retailers in July; ebook is available now.)
So what’s it about?
ABOUT
The Island Bookshop
When Kennedy Marshall sets off for a prestigious career in the city, she leaves behind the sunlit shores of North Carolina’s Outer Banks—and runs from a love she believes she can never have. With her sister, Lara, managing their grandmother’s beloved island bookshop, Kennedy feels confident she’s escaped the past. But when Lara is suddenly injured, Kennedy is drawn back into the island’s warm embrace—and bittersweet memories she thought she’d buried forever.
For Wes Armstrong, the Outer Banks is more than home—it’s his anchor. Building a successful family business was supposed to bring stability, but life has been anything but steady since his wife’s passing. Haunted by past regrets and facing a life-changing decision, Wes is determined to make the right choice for his family’s future. Yet Kennedy’s unexpected return stirs up old emotions and mistakes he thought he’d put to rest.
As hidden family secrets surface and long-buried truths come to light, Kennedy and Wes must navigate the delicate tides of forgiveness, second chances, and the unspoken love that still lingers between them. Can they find the courage to rewrite their story and create a new future on the island’s shifting sands?
Perfect for fans of clean, wholesome romance and gentle mysteries, The Island Bookshop is a heartwarming story of love, family, and the enduring power of second chances.
Let’s meet…
Kennedy Marshall
Kennedy has made a career from rare books—their preservation, grading them, and authenticating them. She’s finally got the job she always dreamed of at the Library of Congress in DC, plus a YouTube channel ever increasing in popularity that’s beginning to pad her income. Life’s perfect…until her sister falls off the ladder to the attic in the bookshop they co-own in the Outer Banks, and Kennedy has to go home to Hatteras Island to help out. She thought she’d escaped all the memories—and the best friend she does not want to be in love with anymore. But facing them—and Wes—all summer? This isn’t at all what she’d planned. And what had Lara even been doing up in the attic? More alarming still: Why is the deed to the bookstore in the name of a stranger?
The Boy Next Door
Wes Armstrong
Wes loves helping his family run their real estate company and bringing paradise to people a week at a time—especially since it keeps him busy, keeps him from dwelling too long on his wife’s death two years ago…and the fact that he’ll never get to fix everything that had gone wrong in their relationship. But when Armstrong Realty gets an offer from a national vacation rental chain, suddenly everything’s up in the air. He’s glad Kenni’s home to work through it with him…except that when Kenni’s home, he can’t help but wonder about all the could-have-beens.
In 1938…
Ana Horvat
In 1938, Ana Horvat arrives in Avon to join her husband, Marko, who’d immigrated a few months ahead of her. Their goal: to build a life for their coming child in a land of promise, rather than under the oppressive regime of Mussolini in their native Dalmatia. But though Ana is quick to find a friend in Caroline Armstrong, not everyone on the insular island is so quick to accept someone different. Can the books Ana loves build a bridge between her and her new community while Marko is away on a fishing trip…or will it be the very thing to drive in a wedge she’ll never be able to overcome?
This is the book I wrote entirely while undergoing chemo last year, and focusing on a fun beach read, with plenty of family secrets and drama but also a setting I know and love and a book-theme that made me sigh in delight, was such a treat! Avon is one of a cluster of little villages on Hatteras Island near the famous Hatteras Lighthouse, and it’s where my family vacations almost every year. I love visiting Buxton Village Books a few miles down the road, and that shop served as the inspiration for the bookstore Kennedy and her sister, Lara, run in this story. With a little bit of Books to Be Red on Ocracoke thrown in too. 😉 (Thanks to both bookshop owners for answering my questions!)
There is a light historical time-slip element (about 1/3 of the story), but it’s mostly contemporary. And while historicals still hold my heart, it was definitely fun to get to write in the modern world. And especially to get to pick names without looking up if they’d have been use in a particular region at a particular time. 😉 LOTS of my P&P ladies have characters named after them in this one!
The Secret Garden plays a key role in the book! Which means I had an excuse to buy the pretty Wordsworth Collector’s Edition and reread this favorite childhood classic last summer. It was every bit as delightful as I remembered!
Kennedy and her sister Lara co-own the Island Bookshop, which they inherited from their grandmother, who converted her family home into the store when they were girls. The perfect place to stop by for your beach read!
And of course, some secondary Characters you’ll be seeing more of in the next books!
Harper Dailey is one of Kennedy’s good friends. She just moved home from Savannah to help out in her family’s bakery, and though she’d always known her parents meant for her to inherit and run Sunshine Bakery, she hadn’t intended to take it over quite so soon. After her dad had a heart attack though, he couldn’t keep up. So here she is.
Beckett “Beck” Mills moved to Hatteras after his stint in the Navy and runs a fishing charter during the summer months…and is happy to be a recluse during the winter. He, Wes, and Asher have been a solid trio, in part because they know to leave him alone and not press him for the history he has no interest in hashing out.
Asher Whetsone owns a beach equipment rental shop specializing in bicycles and anything else with wheels. He’s all about the therapy we can get from spending time out in nature…and likes to think that the countless hours he’s spent cycling along the shore has taught him patience. He certainly prays so…because he’s going to need it.
Kennedy’s sister, Lara, has always been content to run the Island Bookshop. But when a Traumatic Brain Injury from a concussion leaves her unable to handle reading or working on screens, all her dreams come to a screeching halt, and she’s forced to ask herself what comes next, when nothing is what she wants it to be.
The Island Bookshop
Contemporary Romance with a Historical Thread
AVAILABLE NOW!
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.