Beach reading season 2024 officially begins!

I had a lovely mid-week day off last week and decided to take a hop down to seaside Sperlonga.

I love visiting this pretty beach town. Heck, much of my first novel, Three Coins, was set here. In that novel, three women meet and become unlikely friends when they are all in Sperlonga off-season.

Some of those vibes felt familiar, because most of the day I had the beach entirely to myself. The joy of a Wednesday visit in April!

It was fabulous – and I so enjoyed taking walks along that long stretch of (deserted) beach and my ceremonial cracking-ou-my-novel for my very first session of Beach Reading 2024. Let the season officially begin!

It was great to kick off (my) official season with Gill Paul’s A Beautiful Rival, a wonderful historical fiction about the lives of two cutthroat pioneering women of the beauty industry: Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubenstein. I was thoroughly lost in the engaging story of these two ambitious career women clawing their way to the top of their industry in then early twentieth century

Glad to have gotten this great start to the seaon. I know my subsequent trips to this beach, I’ll be sharing in with then throngs, so I enjoyed this wonderful, slefish time when it was all for me.

Happy beach reading!