Jane Green - The Beach House
Here you can read online Jane Green - The Beach House full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2009, publisher: Penguin Group USA, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Beach House
- Author:
- Publisher:Penguin Group USA
- Genre:
- Year:2009
- Rating:4 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Beach House: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Beach House" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Make this your next book club selection and everyone saves. Get 15% off when you order 5 or more of this title for your book club. Simply enter the coupon code GREENBEACH at checkout. This offer does not apply to eBook purchases. This offer applies to only one downloadable audio per purchase. The New York Times bestseller and ultimate beach read from the author of Second Chance Nan Powell is a free-spirited, sixty-five-year-old widow whos not above skinny-dipping in her neighbors pools when theyre away and who dearly loves her Nantucket home. But when she discovers that the money she thought would last forever is dwindling, she realizes she must make drastic changes to save her beloved house. So Nan takes out an ad: Rooms to rent for the summer in a beautiful old Nantucket home with water views and direct access to the beach. Slowly people start moving in to the house, filling it with noise, laughter, and with tears. As the house comes alive again, Nan finds her family and friends expanding. Her son comes home for the summer, and then an unexpected visitor turns all their lives upside down. As she did so masterfully in her New York Times bestseller Second Chance, Jane Green once again proves herself one of the preeminent writers of contemporary womens fiction.
Jane Green: author's other books
Who wrote The Beach House? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Jane Green
Jane Green
Jane Green
Jane Green
Jane Green
Mary Kay Andrews
Rachel Hanna
Monroe
Monroe
Marisa De los Santos
Kate Mosse
Elin Hilderbrand
Elin Hilderbrand
The Beach House — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Beach House" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Table of Contents
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Straight Talking
Jemima J
Mr. Maybe
Bookends
Babyville
Spellbound
The Other Woman
Swapping Lives
Second Chance
Jemima J
Mr. Maybe
Bookends
Babyville
Spellbound
The Other Woman
Swapping Lives
Second Chance
To Ian Warburg
For being my home
For being my home
Chapter One
The bike crunches along the gravel path, weaving around the potholes that could present danger to someone who didnt know the road like the back of their hand.
The woman on the bike raises her head and looks at the sky, sniffs, smiles to herself. A foggy day in Nantucket, but she has lived here long enough to know this is merely a morning fog, and the bright early-June sunshine will burn it off by midday, leaving a beautiful afternoon.
Good. She is planning lunch on the deck today, is on her way into town via her neighbors house, where she has spent the last hour or so cutting the large blue mophead hydrangeas and stuffing them into the basket on the front of the bike. She doesnt really know these neighborsso strange to live in the same house you have lived in for forty-five years, a house in a town where once you knew everyone, until one day you wake up and realize you dont know people anymorebut she has guessed from the drawn blinds and absence of cars they are not yet here, and they will not miss a couple of dozen hydrangea heads.
The gate to their rear garden was open, and she had heard around town they had brought in some super-swanky garden designer. She had to look. And the pool had been open, the water was so blue, so inviting, it was practically begging her to strip off and jump in, which of course she did, her body still slim and strong, her legs tan and muscled from the daily hours on the bike.
She dried off naturally, walking naked around the garden, popping strawberries and peas into her mouth in the kitchen garden, admiring the roses that were just starting, and climbing back into her clothes with a contented sigh when she was quite dry.
These are the reasons Nan has come to have a reputation for being slightly eccentric. A reputation she is well aware of, and a reputation she welcomes, for it affords her freedom, allows her to do the things she really wants to do, the things other people dont dare, and because she is thought of as eccentric, exceptions are always made.
It is, she thinks wryly, one of the beautiful things about growing old, so necessary when there is so much else that is painful. At sixty-five she still feels thirty, and on occasion, twenty, but she has long ago left behind the insecurities she had at twenty and thirty, those niggling fears: that her beauty wasnt enough, not enough for the Powell family; that she had somehow managed to trick Everett Powell into marrying her; that once her looks started to fade, they would all realize she wasnt anyone, wasnt anything, and would then treat her as she had always expected when she first married into this illustrious family... as nothing.
Her looks had served her well. Continue to serve her well. She is tall, skinny and strong, her white hair is glossy and sleek, pulled back in a chignon, her cheekbones still high, her green eyes still twinkling with amusement under perfectly arched brows.
Nans is a beauty that is rarely seen these days, a natural elegance and style that prevailed throughout the fifties, but has mostly disappeared today, although Nan doesnt see it, not anymore.
Now when she looks in the mirror she sees the lines, her cheeks concave under her cheekbones, the skin so thin it sometimes seems that she can see her bones. She covers as many of the imperfections as she can with makeup, still feels that she cannot leave her house without full makeup, her trademark scarlet lipstick the first thing she puts on every morning, before her underwear even, before her bath.
But these days her makeup is sometimes patchy, her lipstick smudging over the lines in her lips, lines that they warned her about in the eighties, when her son tried to get her to stop smoking, holding up photographs in magazines of women with dead, leathery skin.
I cant give up smoking, she would say, frowning. I enjoy it too much, but I promise you, as soon as I stop enjoying it, Ill give it up.
The day is yet to come.
Thirty years younger and she would never have dared trespass, swim naked in an empty swimming pool without permission. Thirty years younger and she would have cared too much what people thought, wouldnt have cut flowers or carefully dug up a few strawberry plants that would certainly not be missed, to replant them in her own garden.
But thirty years younger and perhaps, if she had dared and had been caught, she would have got away with it. She would have apologized, would have invited the couple back for a drink, and the husband would have flirted with her, would have taken the pitcher of rum punch out of her hand and insisted on pouring it for her as she bent her head down to light her cigarette, looking up at him through those astonishing green eyes, flicking her blond hair ever so slightly and making him feel like the most important man in the room, hell, the only man in the room, the wife be damned.
Thirty years younger and the women might have ignored her, but not, as they do now, because they think shes the crazy woman in the big old house on the bluff, but because they were threatened, because they were terrified that she might actually have the power to take their men, ruin their lives. And they were right.
Not that she ever did.
Not back then.
Of course there have been a few affairs, but Nan was never out to steal a man from someone else, she just wanted some fun, and after Everett died, after years of being on her own, she came to realize that sometimes sex was, after all, just sex, and sometimes you just had to take it where you could find it.
The village of Siasconset, known to all simply as Sconset, is burning with a bright morning light by the time Nan arrives on her bike. She cycles past the Sconset caf, around the corner past the Book Store that isnt a book store but sells liquor instead, and hops off at the general store to get some delicious sweetmeats, designer candles.
All the way at the back there is still a refrigerator stuffed full of yogurt, milk, eggsthe bare essentials of lifebut the rest of the store is taken up with gourmet foods, sesame crackers, delicious sweetmeats, and with designer candles and the necessary wall of T-shirts, baseball caps and tote bags advertising that the tourists had been to Sconset for a vacation, were wealthy enough to afford to come to a place where billionaires play.
As always, she heads to the back, nodding at the tourists, waving hello to the woman behind the cash register.
She is a familiar sight in Sconset, her long linen skirts floating behind her as she cycles along on a rusty old Schwinn. It is not a bike you often see these days, with its huge oversized basket on the front, but it is the one that she and Everett bought when they spent their first summer here, back in 1962, when she was twenty, and hed brought her home to Windermere to meet his parents.
Nan cycles slowly, one hand lightly balanced on the handlebar, the other wielding a cigarette. She waves at everyone she passes, greets them with a smile, stopping to chat if the whim takes her, or if she sees a neighbor busy in the garden.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Beach House»
Look at similar books to The Beach House. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
Mary Kay Andrews
Rachel Hanna
Monroe
Monroe
Marisa De los Santos
Kate Mosse
Elin Hilderbrand
Elin Hilderbrand
Reviews about «The Beach House»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Beach House and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.