Thirtysomething

From the bestselling author of Tropesick, this intimate, grounded love story follows a washed-up party girl and a newly divorced neurosurgeon who return to their hometown for the summer and agree to recreate a coming-of-age movie, a game that surfaces their deepest shames and their impossible, rapidly growing attachment to one another.

When former it-girl Greta Greene returns home to suburban Miami after losing her job in New York’s nightclub scene, her glamorous life soon devolves into little more than getting high in her backyard under the watch of her overly judgmental mother. But then, Greta bumps into Nate Golden, her childhood neighbor turned Ohio-based neurosurgeon, and suddenly, summer just got a whole lot more interesting.

While Greta feels like the same person she was when she fled her hometown at 22, something seems to have shifted in the once-timid and famously overachieving Nate. He’s a little darker, a little more undone. And when Greta learns that he’s recently divorced and on leave from work due to a mysteriously injured hand, it becomes clear that Nate, too, has returned to the house he grew up in to pick up the pieces of his shattered life.

As the two reconnect, Greta decides that what Nate really needs is to finally experience the reckless summer he never had—specifically, the kind you’d see in a coming-of-age movie. Together, they set out to recreate one, joking that by the list’s end, Nate will be healed and ready to return to his children and his regular, shiny life six states away.

But the game they’re playing works a little too well, and within days, every scene Nate and Greta replicate brings to light their very adult regrets. As the two grow closer, their rapidly blooming attachment to each other starts looking less like a casual fling, and more like a heartbreak waiting to happen. After all, the summer has to end eventually.

Tropes:
• “just for the summer”
• starting over in your 30s
• hurt/comfort
• hot doctor