There are other novels set on islands that might as well be Nantucket, like the shark-infested Amity Island of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, Packet Island of Herman Rauscher’s Summer of ’42, and the WASP-y Waskeke Island of Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements. The stories are fiction, but the names (of streets, businesses, and other landmarks) remain exactly as they are on a map of the island. Hilderbrand’s Nantucket is a fully realized world. I could visit a world I had seen in glimpses through breaks in the hedges of sprawling summer compounds. Stranded on a wintry island, at least I could escape into an endless summer. I was daydreaming of oysters at Cru and dinner at the Blue Bistro, places real and imagined. (I’ve since read all 21 of Hilderbrand’s summer novels.) Nor’easters pounded the island waves broke at the feet of quaint beach cottages. Before the month was out, I’d read The Perfect Couple, then Summer of ’69, Barefoot, The Matchmaker, Here’s to Us, and Beautiful Day. Whatever it was, I’d finally been bucked off my literary high horse, and I checked out one Hilderbrand novel after another from the island’s library. Perhaps it was the pandemic-induced isolation coupled with the sun setting at four in the afternoon. My idea of a good time was going to a Moby-Dick marathon at the Whaling Museum, staying up late into the night listening to community members read aloud from Melville’s masterpiece under a whale skeleton suspended from the ceiling. Up until that point, most of my reading about the island I’ve called home for eight years was confined to the classics. It was 28 Summers, Hilderbrand’s take on the 1978 film Same Time Next Year, in which a city-dwelling man and a woman who lives in a simple beach cottage on Nantucket begin a torrid love affair that lasts for-you guessed it-28 summers. I read my first Elin Hilderbrand novel on a cold January day two years ago. Our second greatest export is signed copies of Elin Hilderbrand’s beachy novels: more than 5,000 copies of The Hotel Nantucket were shipped to readers from the island’s independent bookstore, Mitchell’s Book Corner, this past June. Today, the island’s primary export is middle- and lower-income families who can no longer afford to live here. In the first half of the 20th century, writers like Nathaniel Benchley, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck, and the Gilbreth family all found inspiration in summer homes 30 miles out to sea. Nantucket Island was once the whale oil capital of the world.

Barefoot by hildebrand