Two women—separated by decades and continents, and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the bestselling author of The Summer Wives.

New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams—one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.

Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.

Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.

This book contains mentions of sexual assault.

I was already a big fan of Beatriz Williams’s novels when I picked up Husbands & Lovers. The lavish New England summertime towns, shot through with flashes of old, moneyed New York. The brilliant, spunky historical women, real and imagined. The nail-biting suspense and timeless conflicts, occasionally with a hint of espionage or aerial derring-do. But I have to confess that Husbands & Lovers just took first place on my Beatriz Williams bookshelf.

So what, you might ask, is it about Beatriz’s latest that has me swooning like one of her characters? The reappearance of memorable figures and entrancing settings from prior books doesn’t hurt. Neither does the intoxicating mix of enduring first love, desperately held secrets, prohibited romance, rock-and-roll fame, and unimaginable treachery, all driven by a mother’s unwavering devotion to her child. Add to this the fact that this heady cocktail features a dual timeline, with a present-day story interwoven with a 1950s Egypt one.

With this foray into a prominent current-day narrative in Husbands & Lovers, Beatriz Williams reveals the countless, often invisible ways that the past ripples into the present, and opens our eyes to the history reverberating in our modern lives. This is summer’s must-read novel. Really, it’s that good!