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Husbands & Lovers by Beatriz Williams

Historical fiction

Husbands & Lovers

3peat author

Beatriz Williams is officially a 3-time author at BOTM, which is a pretty big deal!

by Beatriz Williams

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Quick take

From postwar Cairo to modern-day New England, this bittersweet tale traces intertwined stories of love and sacrifice.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Multiple_Viewpoints

    Multiple viewpoints

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Salacious

    Salacious

  • Illustrated icon, Second_Chance_Romance

    Second chance romance

Synopsis

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.

Content warning

This book contains mentions of sexual assault.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Husbands & Lovers.

Husbands & Lovers

PROLOGUE

Mallory

June 2019

Mystic, Connecticut

I kissed Sam goodbye on a Saturday morning­ toward the end of June, and the call that changed my life came the following Friday afternoon.

Actually, the call came in twice. I’d stepped away from my desk to do some gardening. I remember the tomatoes were growing like crazy that summer, the roses exploding on their bushes. Everything so abundant. Sometimes, when I’m stuck on an idea, I find it helps to walk away for a bit and do something else, something with your hands, something useful, and that knot in your mind will loosen and unwind into the bread dough or the soapsuds or the stacks of folded clothes.

Or the soft, rich loam of a vegetable bed.

It still fills me with terror, to look at that patch of earth and remember how I knelt there, staking the rampant new vines, humming to myself while a new pattern took shape in my head—a ­trailing creeper in a pristine shade of spring green, not too dark or too light, the color of promise, delicate shoots and leaves curling from the parent vine.

At a few minutes to three, I stood up, dusted my jeans, shucked off my gloves, and went into the house for a glass of water and my sketch pad.

I remember my phone lay on the kitchen counter, because I hadn’t carried it outdoors with me. You know how it is. I meant to step out for a few minutes to pull some weeds, maybe water the tomatoes, breathe some fresh air, but one thing led to another, and it was a beautiful day, eighty degrees and not as humid as it gets later in the summer. A breeze came in from the Mystic River, tinged with brine. Tourists would be swarming the drawbridge for ice cream. Over at the aquarium, kids would be screaming with joy as the belugas hurtled past on the other side of the plexiglass. Anyway, my phone sat alone on the counter, so I picked it up to check for messages and startling news alerts, maybe a little light scrolling, and instead I saw that I’d missed two calls from Camp Winnipesaukee.

You know that feeling. Every parent knows that feeling.

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Why I love it

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!

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