Guest Post and Giveaway: Elin Hilderbrand talks about A Summer Affair

The awesome and generous Hatchette Book Group has joined up with Books on the Brain to give away TWO beautiful beach books by Elin Hilderbrand!  One lucky winner will receive A Summer Affair, her latest, and Barefoot, which was just released in paperback this month.  All you need to do is leave a comment here by July 15th for a chance to win.  If you blog about the contest and link back here, you’ll get an extra chance!

In this guest post, Elin Hilderbrand talks about her new book, A Summer Affair, which is being published TODAY!! Congratulations, Elin!   

A Summer Affair is a novel about a woman named Claire Danner Crispin, the mother of four children who has an artistic career and who, because of some old guilt and her inability to say no, agrees to chair a huge summer benefit concert for a local Nantucket charity…and as she does so, her life slowly falls apart. 

Where did I come up with such an idea, you ask???  I myself (with only three children and an artistic career) sit on the Board of Directors of no less than three Nantucket non-profits.  I have chaired 5 major summer events in the past 5 years; much of the fodder for this novel came from my own experience…in meetings, and more meetings, and more meetings.  However, meetings alone do not make up a novel.  The drama that unfolds as various personalities collide over this band or that caterer does not a best seller make.  And so although Elin Hilderbrand the Board Member/Event Co-Chair donated the seed of the idea for the book, Elin Hildebrand the author of six previous novels about love and betrayal and friendship between women and sex and regret and healing took over. 

A Summer Affair is a novel about all of these things, but primarily it is about one woman, our darling Claire, and her struggle to balance what is best for everyone else with what is best for herself.  It is about veering off the path and then correcting oneself.  It is about pursuing one’s forbidden fantasy and then taking comfort in the security of home and family.  It is about food and drink, rock and roll, work and play.  It is about me, yes, and it is about all of us.

Blogger Bio: Elin Hilderbrand lives on Nantucket with her husband and their three young children. She grew up in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, and traveled extensively before settling on Nantucket, which has been the setting for her five previous novels. Hilderbrand is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the graduate fiction workshop at the University of Iowa.