You are here

Fill Your Beach Bag: Annabel Monaghan and Avery Carpenter Forrey in Conversation with Colleen McKeegan

Submitted by elmstreetbooks on Mon, 04/24/2023 - 10:08am

REGISTER HERE

Join us on Thursday, June 15th at 6PM at Rosie New Canaan to celebrate the release of Same Time Next Summer by Annabel Monaghan and Social Engagement by Avery Carpenter Forrey. Moderated by author and editor 
Colleen McKeegan. 

Same Time Next Summer

The ultimate summer nostalgia read, about an engaged woman who comes face to face with her first love who she hasn't seen in fourteen years, but who she spent every summer with from age five to seventeen when he broke her heart, calling into question everything she thought she knew about their love story, and herself.

“An unforgettable love story…Bursting with the magic of first love, it’s everything I want in a summer romance.”—Carley Fortune, author of Every Summer After


Beach Rules:
Do take long walks on the sand.
Do put an umbrella in every cocktail.
Do NOT run into your first love.

    Sam’s life is on track. She has the perfect doctor fiancé, Jack (his strict routines are a good thing, really), a great job in Manhattan (unless they fire her), and is about to tour a wedding venue near her family’s Long Island beach house. Everything should go to plan, yet the minute she arrives, Sam senses something is off. Wyatt is here. Her Wyatt. But there’s no reason for a thirty-year-old engaged woman to feel panicked around the guy who broke her heart when she was seventeen. Right? 

    Yet being back at this beach, hearing notes from Wyatt’s guitar float across the night air from next door as if no time has passed—Sam’s memories come flooding back: the feel of Wyatt’s skin on hers, their nights in the treehouse, and the truth behind their split. Sam remembers who she used to be, and as Wyatt reenters her life their connection is as undeniable as it always was. She will have to make a choice.

Social Engagement

“A witty and addictive behind-the-scenes account of today’s highly curated and hashtagged wedding world. Clear your weekend and prepare to fall in love with this delicious debut.” —Lauren Weisberger, bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Where the Grass is Green and the Girls are Pretty

A bitingly sharp and darkly humorous debut novel exploring millennial wedding culture, class, and relationships, all filtered through the ever-present lens of social media.

In an opulent honeymoon suite in Watch Hill, Rhode Island’s most desirable wedding venue, 29-year-old Callie Holt is spending her wedding night lying in a bathtub shoveling down a pizza; her expensive white dress now splattered with sauce and her groom passed out in the next room. With her seven-hour-old marriage already imploded, Callie turns to the place of record – her phone – sifting through the photographic evidence of the past year to pinpoint where it all went wrong.

Could it have started when Callie moved in with her best friend, Virginia Murphy, in the swanky Upper East Side pied-à-terre for which Virginia’s parents foot the bill? Or when Virginia’s irritatingly attractive cousin (and Callie’s secret ex) Ollie returned from pursuing his photography career abroad, throwing a wrench in Callie’s relationship with her kind (if a bit dim) finance bro boyfriend, Whit? Or was the true turning point when Callie stumbled upon a dark secret lurking in the Murphys’ well-heeled past, one with the potential to upend everything Callie knows about the people she considers her second family?

Over the course of one wedding-filled year, all these long-simmering secrets and resentments will come bubbling to the surface, leading to a reckoning that will strip Callie and everyone around her down to their most gruesomely real, filter-free selves. As Callie attends wedding after wedding, getting tagged in post after post, she begins to contemplate—and actualize through her own art—the gulf between the true selves of the people around her and the selves they present on their screens.

Annabel Monaghan is the author of IndieNext and LibraryReads pick Nora Goes Off Script as well as two young adult novels and Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?, a selection of laugh-out-loud columns that appeared in the Huffington Post, the Week, and the Rye Record. She lives in Rye, New York, with her family.

 

 

Avery Carpenter Forrey is a writer, editor, and creative consultant. She was a founding team member and Managing Editor at theSkimm, where she cowrote the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Skimm Your Life. She holds an MFA in fiction from NYU, and her work has been published in The Cut, GQ, and elsewhere.

 

 

Colleen McKeegan is an author and editor whose work has appeared in The Cut, Elle, Bustle, Glamour, Fortune, and Marie Claire, where it was nominated for a National Magazine Award. A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a graduate of Georgetown University, Colleen now lives with her family in New York. Her debut novel, The Wild One, is out now and her second novel, Rip Tide, will be published by Harper in 2024.

Event date: 
Thursday, June 15, 2023 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Event address: 
Rosie New Canaan
27 Elm Street
New Canaan, CT 06840
Same Time Next Summer By Annabel Monaghan Cover Image
$17.00
ISBN: 9780593544969
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: G.P. Putnam's Sons - June 6th, 2023

Social Engagement: A Novel By Avery Carpenter Forrey Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9780063294905
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Mariner Books - May 23rd, 2023