Beatriz Williams: On Writing a Cold War Novel Set in 1940s New England

Beatriz Williams is the bestselling author of 13 novels, including Her Last Flight, The Summer Wives, and The Golden Hour, as well as All the Ways We Said Goodbye, cowritten with Lauren Willig and Karen White. A native of Seattle, she graduated from Stanford University and earned an MBA in finance from Columbia University.

She lives with her husband and four children near the Connecticut shore, where she divides her time between writing and laundry. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, Beatriz shares the inspiration for her latest historical novel, what she did differently in the publication process, and more.

Name: Beatriz Williams
Literary agent: Alexandra Machinist, CAA
Book title: The Beach at Summerly
Publisher: William Morrow
Release date: June 27, 2023
Genre/category: Historical fiction
Previous titles: Our Woman in Moscow; Her Last Flight; The Summer Wives; The Wicked Widow; and more
Elevator pitch for the book: A Soviet spy sets up operations on a tranquil New England island in the summer of 1946, overturning the life of an ambitious young woman on the brink of adulthood.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

Some time ago, I read a story in a UK newspaper about a woman who had struggled to find closure after a life-changing incident when she was a teenager in the 1960s. A neighbor had moved to her quiet suburban street and befriended her and her mother, until MI5 showed up on the doorstep and asked their help in gathering evidence to prosecute this neighbor as a Soviet radio operator.

I loved all the elements to this story—the coming-of-age narrative, the psychodrama of conflicted loyalties and ongoing guilt, and of course the thrilling game of Cold War espionage, which sits right at the hub of my current historical obsessions.

I wanted to take the seed of this story and plant it inside a social system with a deep sense of culture and family loyalty…such as Winthrop Island, the New England summer resort I created in my previous midcentury novel The Summer Wives, based on the real-life Fishers Island in Long Island Sound.

All my ideas tend to marinate in the back of my brain for at least a couple of years while I’m working on other projects, so by the time I start writing, the process usually takes only a few months, depending on how much additional research the novel requires.

When I first sat down to write The Beach at Summerly a few years ago, I attempted to set the story in a midcentury California suburb involving nuclear scientists, but it just didn’t work. I abandoned that project and turned to write Our Woman in Moscow instead.

Still, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head, and eventually I reimagined the characters on Winthrop Island—a setting that offers so many rich layers of class and clan and history, plus a charismatic coastal environment—where everything came together.

At this point in my writing career, nothing really surprises me about this crazy business!

But I did try something new in the cover design process this time around—while walking around Newport, Rhode Island, one evening last summer with my husband and a friend, I spotted some artwork through a gallery window that perfectly captured the aesthetic I had in mind for the novel’s jacket.

I snapped a couple of photos and forwarded them to my editor, who forwarded them to the art department, and the result is this gorgeous cover for The Beach at Summerly.

I really struggled with the early chapters of the book and the relationship dynamics between the characters. I was unprepared for how difficult it would prove to begin a narrative at this particular point—among people who have known each other since childhood, but only just reunited after a long war that took place while they passed into young adulthood.

I needed to understand who they were before the war and how the war changed them and didn’t change them; it’s like the backstory is an entire novel in itself, and those dynamics are vital to what plays out on the pages. Until I got a handle on all of that shared history—99 percent of which I couldn’t include in the book—it was really slow going, with lots of rewriting!

By now, most readers of historical fiction have a pretty strong grasp of what happened during the Second World War in all its settings—the Resistance, the Holocaust, the home front. The Cold War is a murkier area, in part because it took place largely in the shadows.

Stalin was every bit as monstrous as Hitler, but the Soviet Union was our ally against Nazism, so how do we juggle the moral complexities and the ethical tradeoffs made during and after the war? How did the Allies, attempting to rebuild both physically and psychologically after a devastating war, summon the will and the tactics to address this other form of ideology-driven murderous totalitarianism, and on a radically different battlefield? The repercussions stretch all the way to the present-day war in Ukraine, so the stakes couldn’t be higher.

I hope that by bringing to life a snapshot of the early Cold War as it played out in the lives of ordinary people, I can shed a little more light on this vital period of historical transition that shaped the contours of our modern world…and, of course, entertain and delight readers as well!

Put your phone away. The smartphone is the enemy of creative work.

[Click to continue.]