LUMINA will be released April 1.
Please check back in March for more details. Copies will be available at TheOneNovel.com, Amazon, in Kindle and Nook formats, and in bookstores worldwide by special order.
“It was, after all, eight o’clock. We were perfect for four more hours.”
In the summer of 1928, Lumina, known as the “Palace of Light,” is only reachable from Wilmington, North Carolina by trolley car, where it occupies the entire southern tip of Wrightsville Beach. The grandest beach pavilion on the East Coast creates the backdrop for this fictional tale of young people falling in love—not only with each other but with Lumina itself, where everything is magic from eight until midnight on Saturday nights.
As twenty-year-old Kip Meeks writes in his opening letter to his college pal Perry, “Lumina is the great equalizer for young people who are out for a bit of fun and to celebrate the happiness of youth. The best of the bands come there to play for the summer and thousands of people from all walks of life—tourists and locals, middle-class and aristocrats alike, arrive to dance the evening away on a Saturday night. Many a romance has been born at Lumina, I’ll tell you.” Kip chronicles the summer in weekly letters to Perry, who is laid up in Pinehurst with a broken leg, while Kip’s seventeen-year-old sister Sylvie keeps a diary account of the same events—meeting an heiress with a secret, the jazz explosion, a new dance, and plenty of old front porch gossip—creating a compelling glimpse into two families’ lives.
Fast forward ninety years to the summer of 2018. While going through her late mother Sylvie’s possessions, Anne Borden Montgomery (known from the pages of Flinn’s A Girl Like That) discovers a manuscript that was never published, a novel, compiled from her mother’s diary and her uncle’s letters. AB shares the story on her own front porch with her eager friends, Mr. May, Elle, and Nate, who take turns reading the story aloud, finding interesting parallels in their own lives while becoming acquainted with "new" old friends.
