Beautiful Nights
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A respected professor begins a secret affair with her son’s girlfriend one summer on the Brittany coast in this intense, poetic novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop.
Claire is one of Paris’s most esteemed behavioral biologists, with an enviable career and family. But she has become increasingly frustrated by the stasis of her marriage, including her husband’s unremarked-on affairs, and feels caged by the obligations she took on too early in life.
As she and her family prepare for their annual holiday to the Brittany coast, her son, Nico, comes to her with a request: Can his new girlfriend, Julie, join them for the summer? Nico feels certain that this is the next step in merging their lives together, but Julie wonders if this man is really her path or if her passions—for performance, for intimacy, for a bigger life—will jeopardize their future.
What Julie and Claire don’t realize is that they share a secret—they’ve met before, in a compromising moment whose implications color their relationship from the moment it’s revealed. Both Julie and Claire are at a crossroads, each waiting for something that will set her on fire inside—the rush of life, colors, courage. Under the blazing Brittany sun, by the tranquility of the sea and in the raging of a nighttime thunderstorm, they will ignite and never be the same again.
Sensual, provocative, and probing, Nina George’s Beautiful Nights explores femininity in all its facets and stages. It is a story of becoming who you were meant to be by breaking apart the things you’ve always known.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the immersive latest from George (The Little Paris Bookshop), an unhappily married woman discovers an unexpected connection with her son's girlfriend during a summer on the northern coast of France. Claire Cousteau, a 44-year-old psychology professor, lives in Paris with her unfaithful husband, Gilles, and carries on her own affairs. At a hotel with a lover one afternoon, she's captivated by the sound of a cleaning woman's singing ("Like a woman dancing in the dark as if no one were watching") and briefly meets the woman in the hallway. That night, she goes home to meet her 21-year-old son Nicolas's new girlfriend, Julie Beauchamp, for dinner. There, Claire is startled to recognize Julie as the cleaner from the hotel. Gilles, unaware of the tension, invites Julie to join the family in Trévignon for the summer, where Claire teaches Julie to swim and the women forge an increasingly intense bond as they share secrets with one another. George's fluid and lyrical prose carries the reader along as the story alternates from languid scenes to heavy emotions. It's a worthy choice for the beach bag.
