Books like Memories of the Beach by Lorraine O'Donnell Williams

Twenty‑five year‑old Belly Conklin returns to the family summer home on the coast, where a cancer diagnosis forces her to confront love, loss, and growing up amid the familiar rhythm of beach life.

After being murdered at fourteen, Susie Salmon watches from heaven as her family, friends, and killer grapple with grief and justice, revealing how love and forgiveness shape a family's future.

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

Amid writer's block and a looming deadline, a skeptical romance novelist and a disenchanted literary author trade their craft: she must write a happy ending, he a Great American Novel, as they race to finish before summer ends.

Nathaniel Philbrick's 2000 National Book Award winner chronicles the harrowing ordeal of the Essex whale ship crew that survived a near-sinking and subsequent harrowing journey on the ocean's surface.

A comedic drama about the Jerome family during the Depression, centered on fifteen‑year‑old Eugene and his youthful preoccupations.

"In this memoir, Nega Mezlekia recalls in vivid detail his boyhood in the arid city of Jijiga, Ethiopia, and his bold journey to manhood during the 1970s and 1980s, his country's most turbulent period.". "Mezlekia traces his personal evolution from child to soldier. We meet Wondwossen, his best friend and collaborator in mischief; Mr. Alula, their embattled teacher; Mr. Tadesse, full-time school director and part-time poacher; Ms. Yetaferu, the Orthodox Christian boarder who manages to find a saint to worship each day of the year and thus to avoid gainful employment; and Yeneta, the local priest who is privy to the languages of heaven and hell.". "Notes from the Hyena's Belly teems with the smells, sights, and sounds of life in the Horn of Africa - its violent, ingenious people and its underworld of screeching monkeys, lions, and hyenas. Part autobiography and part social history, this is an unforgettable portrait of a world where the boundaries of credulity are challenged daily. Out of this rich, sundrenched land where modern corruption rides ancient custom like a predator, Mezlekia crafts a world elegant in its aridity, extreme in its absurdity, and vast in its ironies."--BOOK JACKET.

Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of the Lowcountry Summer trilogy, returns to her beloved South with Beach House Memories, the sequel to The Beach House! Autumn brings haunting beauty to the sun-soaked dunes on Isle of Palms, where Olivia “Lovie” Rutledge lives in her beloved Primrose Cottage. As the seasons change, Lovie remembers one special summer… In 1974, America is changing, but Charleston remains eternally the same. When Lovie married aristocratic, well-connected businessman Stratton Rutledge, she turned over her fortune and fate to his control. But she refused to relinquish one thing: her family’s old seaside cottage. Precious summers with her children on the barrier island are Lovie’s refuge from social expectations and her overbearing husband’s philandering. Here, she is the “Turtle Lady,” tending the loggerhead turtles that lay their eggs in the warm night sand and then slip back into the sea. Then, in the summer of ‘74, biologist Russell Bennett visits to research the loggerheads. Their shared interest brings them together, and soon it blooms into a passionate, profound love—forcing Lovie to face an agonizing decision. Stratton’s influence is far-reaching, and if she dares to dream beyond a summer affair, she risks losing her reputation, her wealth, even her children. This emotional tale of a strong woman torn between duty and desire, between tradition and change, is an empowering journey through the seasons of self-discovery. Until this autumn, this time of winds and tides, of holding on and letting go…

An intimate biography of Nicola Fuller, tracing her life from hopeful childhood in East Africa to the hardships of farming in Rhodesia, the fallout of civil war, and her final years on a Zambezi Valley farm.