12 Best Anita Shreve Books

After her husband’s plane explodes off the coast of Ireland, Kathryn Lyons must navigate grief, intrusive investigators, and a ravenous press. The more she learns about the crash, the more she realizes the man she married was hiding another life that upends everything she thought she knew.

Snowed in at an inn in the Berkshire Mountains, a group of former prep‑school classmates reunite for the hurried wedding of two first loves, Bridget and Bill. As they revisit a long‑ago tragedy and present‑day secrets, each quietly measures the life they chose against the one they imagined.

At twenty‑nine, twice‑married Sydney Sklar takes a summer job tutoring Julie Edwards at her family’s New Hampshire beach house. Drawn into the family’s tensions and into a charged triangle with Julie’s two older brothers, Sydney finds her hard‑won stability tested yet again by love and betrayal.

In the summer of 1899, fifteen‑year‑old Olympia Biddeford leaves Boston for a fashionable New Hampshire seaside colony and falls into a scandalous affair with a married, much older doctor. When their passion leads to pregnancy and ruin, Olympia must decide what she is willing to sacrifice for her child.

Twelve‑year‑old Nicky Dillon and her widowed father discover an abandoned newborn in the snowy woods near their isolated New Hampshire home. When the baby’s young mother later appears at their door, the three are forced to confront grief, responsibility, and how far compassion should reach.

At a literary festival in Toronto, poets Linda Fallon and Thomas Janes reunite decades after a brief, intense love affair. The novel moves backward through time—from middle age to young adulthood to their first teenage summer—tracing how one relationship shapes two lives in ways neither fully understands.

Newlyweds Honora and Sexton Beecher think they’ve found their dream home in a weathered beach house, but the 1929 crash and looming mill layoffs shatter their plans. Drawn into a bitter labor struggle, they form unlikely alliances that test their marriage, loyalties, and ideas about security.

At an elite New England prep school, a grainy videotape of a drunken dorm‑room encounter between three basketball players and a fourteen‑year‑old girl explodes into scandal. Told through many voices, the novel follows students, parents, and teachers as one reckless night shatters reputations and futures.

Photographer Jean Janes sails to the Isles of Shoals to shoot a story about the 1873 Smuttynose Island murders, bringing along her poet husband, their young daughter, and his brother’s girlfriend. As Jean pores over a survivor’s old account, jealousies on the boat begin to echo the historic crime.

When Andrew returns to his rural hometown to settle his late mother’s affairs, he is drawn back to Eden Close, the beautiful neighbor who was blinded and traumatized in a violent crime years before. As he uncovers buried secrets, their shared past tilts toward a possible new future.

A woman wearing a World War I nursing uniform wakes in a British field hospital with no memory and takes the name Stella Bain. Under the care of a London surgeon and his wife, she slowly uncovers her true identity—Etna Bliss—and must return to America to face a painful family history.

In 1947 Maine, young mother Grace Holland survives a devastating coastal wildfire by sheltering overnight in the ocean with her children. Left homeless and unsure whether her volatile husband is alive, she builds a tentative new life in an empty seaside house until past obligations come roaring back.