Malibu: August 1983. It’s the day of Nina Riva’s annual end-of-summer party, and anticipation is at a fever pitch. Everyone wants to be around the famous Rivas: Nina, the talented surfer and supermodel; brothers Jay and Hud, one a championship surfer, the other a renowned photographer; and their adored baby sister, Kit. Together the siblings are a source of fascination in Malibu and the world over—especially as the offspring of the legendary singer Mick Riva. The only person not looking forward to the party of the year is Nina herself.

Irene Steele shares her idyllic life in a beautiful Iowa City Victorian house with a husband who loves her to sky-writing, sentimental extremes. But as she rings in the new year one cold and snowy night, everything she thought she knew falls to pieces with a shocking phone call: her beloved husband, away on business, has been killed in a helicopter crash. Before Irene can even process the news, she must first confront the perplexing details of her husband's death on the distant Caribbean island of St. John.

Peyton Cabot's 15th year will be a painful and transformative one. His father, the heroic but reluctant head of a moneyed Savannah family, has come home from WWII a troubled vet, drowning his demons in bourbon and distancing himself from his son. A tragic accident shows Peyton the depths of his parents' devotion to each other but interrupts his own budding romance with the girl of his dreams, Lisa Wallace. Struggling to cope with a young life upended, Peyton makes a daring decision: He will retrace a journey his father took at 15, riding his bicycle all the way to Key West, Florida.

Baja California, 1979. Viridiana spends her days watching the dead sharks piled beside the seashore, as the fishermen pull their nets. There is nothing else to do. Yet her head is filled with dreams of Hollywood films, of romance, of a future beyond the drab town where her only option is to marry and have children. Three wealthy American tourists arrive for the summer, and Viridiana is magnetized. They offer excitement, and perhaps an escape. When one of them dies, Viridiana lies to protect her friends. Soon enough, someone’s asking questions....

Hollis and Matt met on Tomales Bay the summer they both turned 12, and during the summers that followed, they grew up and fell in love. One night, after an unexpected test, they fell apart. Now, 12 years later, Hollis, who seeks refuge at her uncle’s seaside cottages to ride out a storm of her own making and Matt, weighed down by obligation to his parents, both return to Tomales Bay. Forced to share another summer in the small town that brought them together, will Hollis and Matt be able to move beyond the echo of their past and into a future filled with ever after?

School teacher Julie Barlow and her two best friends, Beth and Aggie, are looking forward to an adults only beach vacation. Julie also plans to use the time to figure out why her perfectly planned life has gone terribly amiss. They’ve barely hit the road when a frantic call from Julie’s mother hijacks their best laid plans. Uncle Tony “Lucky” Costa is missing. Always entertaining, often irresponsible, never reliable, Uncle Lucky was a favorite with her friends. For Julie, for whom he’d been a sometimes surrogate father, not so much.

Zoe Bascombe has never said no to her family. When she blew her Julliard audition, she caved to their wishes and went to business school. But when her mother dies and leaves instructions for Zoe to spread her ashes at a place called Wind Chime Beach, she defies her brothers and starts out for a New England town none of them has ever heard of and discovers a side of her garden club mother that her wildest dreams hadn’t imagined. Zoe has another family.

Nicole Oruwari has the perfect life: a handsome husband, a palatial house in the heart of Lagos, and a glamorous group of friends. She left gloomy London and a troubled family past behind for sunny Lagos, becoming part of the Nigerwives—a community of foreign women married to Nigerian men. But when Nicole disappears without a trace after a boat trip, the cracks in her alleged perfect life start to show. As the investigation turns up nothing but dead ends, her auntie Claudine decides to take matters into her own hands.

In the summer of 1942, Hermie is 15. He is wildly obsessed with sex, and passionately in love with an "older woman" of 22, whose husband is overseas and at war. Ambling through Nantucket Island with his friends, Hermie's indelible narration chronicles his frantic efforts to become a man, especially one worthy of the lovely Dorothy, as well as his glorious and heartbreaking initiation into sex.

Meet a big-city cop trying to run her twin’s small-town lingerie shop and milk her goats, an Australian actor/professional werewolf who’s getting pretty bloody tired of hearing his tagline quoted back to him, an American businessman terrified of water who’s forced to wade into the Australian surf in his shirt and tie, and much more.

Six years earlier, Trina Grissom disappeared, on the run for her life. Now living under an assumed identity - as Samantha Marsh - she still struggles with the dark secret she harbors and the fear she might one day be found. When she moves to the coastal town of Rarity Cove, South Carolina, to open a cafe, a handsome widower begins to chip away at the walls she's built to protect herself. Mark St. Clair lost his wife two years ago in a tragic accident. He distracts himself from his lingering grief by running the family business and caring for his troubled young daughter.

At the end of a sweltering summer shaped by the tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy, race riots, political protests, and the birth of black power, three coeds from New York City - Zelda Livingston, Veronica Cook, and Daphne Brooks - pack into Veronica’s new Ford Fairlane convertible, bound for Atlanta and their last year at Spelman College. It is the beginning of a journey that will change their lives irrevocably.

Faith Benson isn’t your emergency contact, she’s the party-girl friend you call for a good time. She's the gal-pal who loves mimosas at brunch and martinis at Happy Hour. But her carefree lifestyle threatens her job at a top Seattle ad agency; there’s no one better at landing big accounts (when she shows up). But now her boss demands she take a leave of absence to get her head on straight.

A community in the Piedmont of North Carolina rises in outrage as a county initiative draws students from the largely Black east side of town into predominantly White high schools on the west. For two students, Gee and Noelle, the integration sets off a chain of events that will tie their two families together in unexpected ways over the span of the next 20 years.

Honey Jane Moon is a scrappy little know-it-all - brave, smart, but ill-prepared to become the most famous child star in America, even though she’s not quite as young as everyone believes. It won’t take her long to drive the men in her life crazy. There’s Eric Dillion, a smoldering bad boy and one of Hollywood’s most gifted actors. And Dash Coogan, the last of the cowboy heroes, a man trapped on a screen too small to contain a legend. When Honey falls in love, she’ll do it the only way she knows how - with all her heart.