Women's Speaker Series: Lauren Willig, author of The Summer Country

June 6, 2019 - 7:00pm

The sunset scene of meadow field with peace environment and sugar palm ; Shutterstock ID 797621176; ISBN: -

Fee: $31/$26 members - includes an autographed copy of The Summer Country, refreshments, and admission to the sculpture garden (come early to stroll the grounds). Register by phone at 414-446-8794.

Margy Stratton, founder and executive producer of Milwaukee Reads produces this series of events featuring writers of particular interest to women.

Lynden Sculpture Garden's Women's Speaker Series and Boswell Books welcome Lauren Willig, author of The Summer Country, to the Lynden Sculpture Garden, Thursday, June 6, 7 pm. For more information on upcoming Women's Speaker Series Events, click here.

About The Summer Country

BARBADOS, 1854: Emily Dawson has always been the poor cousin in a prosperous English merchant clan-- merely a vicar’s daughter, and a reform-minded vicar’s daughter, at that. Everyone knows that the family’s lucrative shipping business will go to her cousin, Adam, one day. But when her grandfather dies, Emily receives an unexpected inheritance: Peverills, a sugar plantation in Barbados—a plantation her grandfather never told anyone he owned.

When Emily accompanies her cousin and his new wife to Barbados, she finds Peverills a burnt-out shell, reduced to ruins in 1816, when a rising of enslaved people sent the island up in flames. Rumors swirl around the derelict plantation; people whisper of ghosts.

Why would her practical-minded grandfather leave her a property in ruins? Why are the neighboring plantation owners, the Davenants, so eager to acquire Peverills? The answer lies in the past— a tangled history of lies, greed, clandestine love, heartbreaking betrayal, and a bold bid for freedom.

A brilliant, multigenerational saga in the tradition of The Thorn Birds and North and South, The Summer Country will beguile readers with its rendering of families, heartbreak, and the endurance of hope against all odds.

About the Author

Lauren Willig is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Ashford Affair and The English Wife, the RITA Award winning Pink Carnation series and two novels co-written with Beatriz Williams and Karen White—The Forgotten Room and The Glass Ocean. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband, preschooler, baby, and lots and lots of coffee.


©2024 Lynden Sculpture Garden