Ocean House Author Series
A glass of wine, a delicious bite, and fascinating conversations with exceptional authors! Join Ocean House owner, actress, and bestselling author Deborah Goodrich Royce for this ongoing series which brings you the best and the brightest of the literary world in a spectacular setting overlooking the sea.
Episodes
3 days ago
3 days ago
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with bestselling authors Hank Phillippi Ryan and Carola Lovering as they discuss their new novels One Wrong Word (Phillipi Ryan) and Bye, Baby (Lovering).
Hank Phillippi Ryan is the USA Today bestselling author of thirteen award-winning novels of suspense. National reviews have called her a “master at crafting suspenseful mysteries” and “a superb and gifted storyteller.” Her novel, THE HOUSE GUEST, received a starred review from Library Journal, calling it “Binge-worhty.” The rave review from Publishers Weekly says “Ryan is a master of suspense.” Her work has resulted in new laws, people sent to prison, homes removed from foreclosure, and millions of dollars in refunds and restitution for victims and consumers. She’s been a radio reporter, a legislative aide in the United States Senate and an editorial assistant at Rolling Stone Magazine, working with Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Avedon and Richard Goodwin. Hank is a founding teacher at Mystery Writers of America University and served as 2013 president of national Sisters in Crime. She blogs at Jungle Red Writers and Career Authors. She is a co-host at FIRST CHAPTER FUN and a founder and co-host of THE BACK ROOM, and the host of A Mighty Mystery on A Mighty Blaze.
Carola Lovering is the author of the novels Tell Me Lies, Too Good to Be True, and Can’t Look Away. She attended Colorado College, and her work has appeared in New York Magazine, W Magazine, Marie Claire, National Geographic, Outside, and Yoga Journal, among other publications. Her novel, Tell Me Lies, is now a drama series on Hulu. She lives in Connecticut with her husband and two young children.
For more information about Hank Phillipi Ryan, visit hankphillippiryan.com. For more information about Carola Lovering, visit carolalovering.com. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Tuesday Nov 12, 2024
Tuesday Nov 12, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with New York Times bestselling authors Martha Hall Kelly and Katherine Reay as they discuss their books The Golden Doves (Martha Hall Kelly) and The Berlin Letters (Katherine Reay).
About Martha Hall Kelly: Martha Hall Kelly’s debut novel LILAC GIRLS, about socialite Caroline Ferriday and her fight to help a group of concentration camp survivors, became an Instant NY Times bestseller in 2016 and sold over two million copies. Once the paperback stayed on the NYT list for fifty-four weeks and became published in fifty countries, she wrote two more novels: LOST ROSES, about Caroline’s mother, and SUNFLOWER SISTERS, about her great grandmother, which also became Instant NY Times bestsellers. Martha grew up in Massachusetts and now splits her time between Connecticut and New York City.
About The Golden Doves: Two female spies risk everything to hunt down an infamous Nazi in this sweeping, profound tale of bravery from the bestselling author of Lilac Girls.
About Katherine Reay: Katherine Reay is a national bestselling and award-winning author of several novels and one nonfiction work. For her fiction, Katherine writes love letters to books, and her novels are saturated with what she calls the “world of books.” They are character-driven stories that examine the past as a way to find one’s best way forward. In the words of The Bronte Plot’s Lucy Alling, Katherine writes of “that time when you don’t know where you’ll be, but you can’t stay as you are.” Katherine holds a BA and MS from Northwestern University and, after several moves across the globe, lives outside Chicago.
About The Berlin Letters: Bestselling author Katherine Reay returns with an unforgettable tale of the Cold War and a CIA code-breaker who risks everything to free her father from an East German prison.
For more information about Martha Hall Kelly, visit penguinrandomhouse.com. For more information about Katherine Reay, visit katherinereay.com. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Monday Oct 21, 2024
Monday Oct 21, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with author Terah Shelton Harris to discuss her novel Long After We Are Gone.
About Long After We Are Gone: “A big, beautiful, devastating, and ultimately hopeful novel.” – Erica Bauermeister, New York Times bestselling author of No Two Persons
An explosive and emotional story of four siblings–each fighting their own personal battle–who return home in the wake of their father’s death in order to save their family’s home from being sold out from under them, from the author of One Summer in Savannah.
“Don’t let the white man take the house.”
These are the last words King Solomon says to his son before he dies. Now all four Solomon siblings must return to North Carolina to save the Kingdom, their ancestral home and 200 acres of land, from a development company, who has their sights set on turning the valuable waterfront property into a luxury resort.
While fighting to save the Kingdom, the siblings must also save themselves from the secrets they’ve been holding onto. Junior, the oldest son and married to his wife for eleven years, is secretly in love with another man. Second son Mance can’t control his temper, which has landed him in prison more than once. CeCe, the oldest daughter and a lawyer in New York City, has embezzled thousands of dollars from her firm’s clients. Youngest daughter Tokey wonders why she doesn’t seem to fit into this family, which has left an aching hole in her heart that she tries to fill in harmful ways. As the Solomons come together to fight for the Kingdom, each of their façades begins to crumble and collide in unexpected ways.
Told in alternating viewpoints, Long After We Are Gone is a searing portrait on the power of family and letting go of things that no longer serve you, exploring the burden of familial expectations, the detriment of miscommunication, and the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children.
About Terah Shelton Harris: Terah Shelton Harris is a collection development librarian based in Alabama and a freelance writer. She has been published in Women’s Health, Natural Solutions, Every Day with Rachael Ray, Backpacker, Draft, and Women’s Adventure.
For more information about Terah Shelton Harris, visit terahsharris.com. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Tuesday Oct 15, 2024
Tuesday Oct 15, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, who will discuss her latest novel, A Most Intriguing Lady.
About A Most Intriguing Lady: From Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, a sweeping, romantic, compulsively readable historical saga about a Duke’s daughter–the perfect Victorian lady–who secretly moonlights as an amateur sleuth for high society’s inner circle.
Victorian London was notorious for its pickpockets. But in the country houses of the elite, gentleman burglars, art thieves, and con men preyed on the rich and titled. Wealthy victims–with their pride and reputation at stake–would never go to the police. They needed a society insider, one of their own, a person of discretion and finely tuned powers of observation, adept at navigating intrigue.
That person was Lady Mary Montagu Douglas Scott, the youngest child of Queen Victoria’s close friends, the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch. Bookish, fiercely intelligent, and a keen observer, Mary has deliberately cultivated a mousey persona that allows her to remain overlooked and significantly underestimated by all. It’s the perfect cover for a sleuth, a role she stumbles into when trying to assist a close friend during a house party hosted by her parents at their stately Scottish home, Drumlanrig Castle.
It is at this party that Lady Mary also meets Colonel Walter Trefusis, a distinguished and extremely handsome war veteran. Tortured by memories of combat, Walter, like Mary, lives a double life, with a desk job in Whitehall providing a front for his role in the British Intelligence Service. The two form an unlikely alliance to solve a series of audacious crimes and indulge in a highly charged on-off romance.
Pacy, romantic, and fun, A Most Intriguing Lady documents one remarkable woman’s ability to be both the perfect lady and a perfectly talented detective…and, of course, to find love too.
About Sarah Ferguson: Sarah Ferguson is the Duchess of York. She is also a bestselling novelist, memoirist, children’s book author, and film producer, and has been a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers and Wedgewood China. She currently campaigns for her Children in Crisis international charity and works on historical documentaries and films that draw on her deep interest in Victorian history. The mother of two daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, and grandmother of three precious grandchildren, she lives in Windsor.
For more information about Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York's books, visit www.amazon.com/Sarah-Ferguson-Book. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Monday Sep 23, 2024
Monday Sep 23, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with our featured authors. This week, New York Times bestselling authors Allison Pataki and Emily Franklin discuss their books Finding Margaret Fuller (Pataki) and The Lioness of Boston (Franklin).
About Allison Pataki: Allison Pataki is the New York Times bestselling author of FINDING MARGARET FULLER, THE MAGNIFICENT LIVES OF MARJORIE POST, THE QUEEN’S FORTUNE, THE TRAITOR’S WIFE, THE ACCIDENTAL EMPRESS, SISI: EMPRESS ON HER OWN, WHERE THE LIGHT FALLS, as well as the nonfiction memoir BEAUTY IN THE BROKEN PLACES and two children’s books, NELLY TAKES NEW YORK and POPPY TAKES PARIS. Allison’s novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. A former news writer and producer, Allison has written for The New York Times, ABC News, The Huffington Post, USA Today, Fox News and other outlets. She has appeared on The TODAY Show, Good Morning America, Fox & Friends, Good Day New York, Good Day Chicago and MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Allison graduated Cum Laude from Yale University with a major in English.
About Finding Margaret Fuller: A “sweeping” (Entertainment Weekly) novel of America’s forgotten leading lady, the central figure of a movement that defined a nation—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post
About Emily Franklin: Emily Franklin is the bestselling author of more than twenty books. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Kenyon Review, and The Journal of the American Medical Association among many other places as well as featured and read aloud on National Public Radio, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries. She lives outside of Boston with her family including four children and two dogs large enough to be lions. Her novel The Lioness of Boston, based on the life of trailblazer Isabella Stewart Gardner is in its sixth printing.
About The Lioness of Boston: “Brings Isabella Stewart Gardner fully, intimately alive—irrepressible and avid for life. In this richly compelling novel, Emily Franklin beautifully conjures this extraordinary woman and her world.”—Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children.
For more information about bestselling author Allison Pataki, visit allisonpataki.com; for Emily Franklin, visit emilyfranklin.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Tuesday Sep 17, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with our featured author. This week, New York Times bestselling author Beatriz Williams will be discussing her new novel, Husbands & Lovers.
About Beatriz Williams: Beatriz Williams is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of nineteen novels, including four novels in collaboration with bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. She graduated from Stanford University with an MBA in finance from Columbia University. Williams has won numerous awards for her novels, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She lives near the Connecticut shore with her husband and four children.
About Husbands & Lovers: Two women—separated by decades and continents and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.
New England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952 and her all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams— one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.
Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.
Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.
For more information about bestselling author Beatriz Williams, beatrizwilliams.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Friday Aug 23, 2024
Friday Aug 23, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with author, podcaster, and book influencer Zibby Owens about her newly published novel, Blank.
About Zibby Owens: Zibby Owens is the author of Bookends: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Literature and the children’s book Princess Charming and is the editor of two anthologies: Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids: A Timeless Anthology and Moms Don’t Have Time To: A Quarantine Anthology. Creator and host of the award-winning daily podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, Zibby is the founder and CEO of Zibby Media, dubbed “the Zibby-verse” by the Los Angeles Times. It includes publishing house Zibby Books, online magazine Zibby Mag, Zibby’s Book Club, retreats, classes, and events. She also owns Zibby’s Bookshop, an independent bookstore in Santa Monica, California. A regular contributor to Good Morning America and other outlets, she loves recommending books as “NYC’s Most Powerful Book-fluencer” (Vulture). A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School, Zibby currently lives in New York (with frequent visits to LA) with her husband, Kyle Owens of Morning Moon Productions, and her four children ages nine to sixteen. Follow her on Instagram @zibbyowens and on Substack, where she tells it like it is.
About Blank: A wife, mother, and frustrated writer faces an impossible deadline for turning her life around in a hilarious debut novel about family, friendship, success, and exhilarating self-(re)discovery.
Pippa Jones is a fortyish former literary sensation who fears she will be a one-hit wonder. After the follow-up book she was almost done writing, Podlusters, had to be tossed (it ended up sharing a plot and title with superstar author Ella Rankin’s summer blockbuster!), she couldn’t write a thing. Months of staring at a blank page made her confidence vanish like a one-night stand. When she finds out that she has only five days left to finish (or rather, start) or repay an advance she’s already spent, Pippa has a brilliantly original idea. Okay, fine, her twelve-year-old son came up with it as a joke, but Pippa and her teenage daughter approved.
Pippa’s not only going to make a bold statement, but she’ll change the book world while she’s at it! Can she pull it off? At this point, she doesn’t have a choice.
When Pippa’s publisher gets intimately involved, it unlocks a series of plot twists she never saw coming. From the courtyards of posh Beverly Hills hotels and Malibu mega-mansions to Brentwood and Santa Monica bookstores, Pippa races against time—in her used Volvo—and discovers more about her career, marriage, family, friends, and herself than she ever could have dreamed up.
For more information about bestselling author Zibby Owens, please visit www.zibbyowens.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit www.deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Tuesday Aug 13, 2024
Tuesday Aug 13, 2024
Join Ocean House owner and author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with bestselling author Dawn Tripp as they discuss her new book, Jackie.
About Dawn Tripp: Dawn Tripp is the author of the novel Georgia, which was a national bestseller, a finalist for the New England Book Award, and the winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature. She is the author of three previous novels: Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, AGNI, Conjunctions, and NPR. Tripp lives in Massachusetts with her sons.
About Jackie: Jackie is the story of a woman—deeply private with a nuanced, formidable intellect—who forged a legacy out of grief and shaped history even as she was living it. It is the story of a love affair, a complicated marriage, and the fracturing of identity that comes in the wake of unthinkable violence.
When Jackie meets the charismatic congressman Jack Kennedy in Georgetown, she is twenty-one and dreaming of France. She has won an internship at Vogue. Kennedy, she thinks, is not her kind of adventure: “Too American. Too good-looking. Too boy.” Yet she is drawn to his mind, his humor, his drive. The chemistry between them ignites. During the White House years, the love between two independent people deepens. Then, a motorcade in Dallas: “Three and a half seconds—that’s all it was—a slivered instant between the first shot, which missed the car, and the second, which did not. . . . A hypnotic burst of sunlight off her bracelet as she waved.”
This vivid, exquisitely written novel is at once a captivating work of the imagination and a window into the world of a woman who led many lives: Jackie, Jacks, Jacqueline, Miss Bouvier, Mrs. Kennedy, Jackie O.
For more information about bestselling author Dawn Tripp, please visit www.dawntripp.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit www.deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Monday Jul 22, 2024
Monday Jul 22, 2024
Join Ocean House owner, actor, and bestselling author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with New York Times bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey will be discussing her new novel, A Happier Life. Refreshments
About Kristy Woodson Harvey: Kristy Woodson Harvey is the New York Times bestselling author of nine novels, including The Wedding Veil, Under the Southern Sky, and The Peachtree Bluff series, which is in development for television with NBC. A Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of journalism, her writing has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including Southern Living, Traditional Home, USA TODAY, Domino, and O. Henry. Kristy is the winner of the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. Her books have received numerous accolades, including Southern Living’s Most Anticipated Beach Reads, Parade’s Big Fiction Reads, and Entertainment Weekly’s Spring Reading Picks. Kristy is the cocreator and cohost of the weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction. She blogs with her mom, Beth Woodson, on Design Chic, and loves connecting with fans on KristyWoodsonHarvey.com. She lives on the North Carolina coast with her husband and son where she is (always!) working on her next novel.
About A Happier Life: With “her signature warmth and Southern charm” (E! Online), the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Songbirds and the Peachtree Bluff series presents a tender and touching novel about a young woman who discovers the family she has always longed for when she spends a life-changing summer in North Carolina.
For more information about New York Times bestselling author Kristy Woodson Harvey, please visit www.kristywoodsonharvey.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit www.deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Monday Jul 15, 2024
07-13-24 Author Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg - Ocean House Author Series
Monday Jul 15, 2024
Monday Jul 15, 2024
Join Ocean House owner, actor, and bestselling author Deborah Goodrich Royce for a conversation with author Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg. She will discuss her latest novel, Daughter of a Promise.
About Daughter of a Promise: Days after graduation, Betsabé Ruiz’s life in New York is turning out to be nothing less than cinematic. Although her first job at a white-shoe Wall Street investment bank is the opportunity of a lifetime, she is not prepared for the magnitude of wealth swirling about her, the long hours and close quarters that infuse her professional relationships with intimacy, nor an unexpected attraction to her boss. And like all great films, Betsabé’s New York dream comes with a twist that challenges her to find a balance between where she came from and where she’s going.
Narrated in the retrospective as a letter of wisdom to her unborn son, Daughter of a Promise captures not only Betsabé’s coming of age but also her journey to understand that deep-seated forces such as desire and love are more complicated than she ever could have imagined.
About Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg: Jeanne Blasberg is an award-winning and bestselling author and essayist. Her novel The Nine (SWP 2019) was honored with the 2019 Foreword Indies Gold Award in Thriller & Suspense and the Gold Medal and Juror’s Choice in the 2019 National Indie Excellence Awards, among others. Eden (SWP 2017), her debut, won the Benjamin Franklin Silver Award for Best New Voice in Fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Historical Fiction. A Smith College graduate, Jeanne is both a teacher of writing and a lifetime learner who serves on the boards of the Boston Book Festival and GrubStreet. She reviews contemporary fiction for the New York Journal of Books and was named a Southampton Writer’s Conference BookEnds Fellow in April 2021. She splits her time between Park City, Utah, and a regenerative farm in Verona, Wisconsin.
For more information about author Jeanne McWilliams Blasberg www.jeanneblasberg.com. For information on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit www.deborahgoodrichroyce.com
Deborah Goodrich Royce
Deborah Goodrich Royce’s thrillers examine puzzles of identity. Reef Road hit Publishers Weekly’s Bestseller list, Good Morning America’s Top 15 list, and was an Indie Next pick by the American Bookseller’s Association for January 2023. Ruby Falls won the Zibby Award for Best Plot Twist in 2021 and Finding Mrs. Ford was hailed by Forbes, Book Riot, and Good Morning America’s “best of” lists in 2019.
She began as an actress on All My Children and in multiple films, before transitioning to the role of story editor at Miramax Films, developing Emma and early versions of Chicago and A Wrinkle in Time. With her husband, Chuck, Deborah restored the 1939 Avon Theatre in Stamford, CT. Under her leadership, the Avon hosts an ongoing series of film luminaries, most recently, Mira Nair, Richard Gere and Chloe Sevigny. Together, Deborah and Chuck have restored the Ocean House Hotel, Deer Mountain Inn, United Theatre, Savoy Bookstore, and numerous Main Street revitalization projects in Rhode Island and the Catskills.
The Ocean House Author Series—a salon style conversation that Deborah created in partnership with The Savoy Bookshop & Café—brings world-class authors to readers in the stunning seaside location of Watch Hill, RI. This year, Deborah will talk there with two dozen writers ranging from Chris Bohjalian to Katie Couric. Past authors have included Zibby Owens, Emma Straub, Annabel Monaghan, Zain Asher, and many more.
She serves on the governing and/or advisory boards of the American Film Institute, Avon Theatre, Greenwich International Film Festival, New York Botanical Garden, Greenwich Historical Society, the Preservation Society of Newport, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach, and the PRASAD Project. Deborah holds a bachelor’s degree in modern foreign languages and an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Lake Erie College.