Hot Nights, Cold Shoulders

In search of good material for her book, an aspiring writer accepts a summer invitation from her high school bully and finds, amid obscene wealth and old wounds, the forbidden love she never planned for.

Isabel Martinez has everything she needs to finally write her book—except an idea. When her high school tormentor, the beautiful and moneyed Natalia Aranaz, extends an inexplicable invitation to spend the summer in her world of private jets and old money, Isabel's practical instincts say no, but her writer's instincts say yes. She arrives with a notebook and a plan, and immediately encounters Kieran O'Connor: a shy, handsome, and prodigiously talented Irish painter who has spent the last year haunted by a face he believes his sleeping mind invented and who, the moment Isabel steps through the door, understands that she was never imaginary at all. The only problem: Natalia's feelings for him are the worst-kept secret in the room.

What builds between Isabel and Kieran is achingly tender, charged, and dangerous: late-night conversations about art and its place in this world; a shared commitment to their creativity that makes them feel less alone; and a mutual attraction they are both too principled and too frightened to name. Isabel has survived too much to be careless with other people's feelings, and Kieran has spent his whole life making himself easy to be around, editing his own needs out of the picture to keep the peace. But their connection becomes increasingly difficult to ignore—something neither restraint nor reason can fully contain. For Kieran, it threatens the fragile equilibrium he's spent years maintaining, pushing him toward choices that could upend everything. For Isabel, it stirs a longing she's worked hard to keep buried, asking more of her than she's willing to give. The closer they get, the harder it is to pretend this is fleeting—or safe. And as the summer deepens, the question isn't whether they feel it, but whether they'll risk everything to face what it might become.

Hot Nights, Cold Shoulders is Gaskell's most ambitious novel to date, a book that wears its summer-romance clothes over something altogether more searching. Beneath the forbidden attraction and the sun-drenched setting lies a story about what it costs to forgive, what it means to finally be witnessed, and what happens when two people choose each other—and their true selves, over all the noise—instead. It is a love story about becoming: Isabel, as she grows into her voice; Kieran into his courage, and both of them into something neither saw coming.