May House

by Jillian Cantor

Genres: Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Three adult sisters inherit a beach house from their grandmother on the condition they return every May to spend one week together, unearthing family secrets, unrequited love, and the deep bonds of sisterhood in this shimmering new novel from the USA TODAY bestselling author of The Fiction Writer and Beautiful Little Fools.

No matter what’s going on in the May sisters’ lives, the one thing they can rely upon is seeing each other for one week each year, while staying at their grandmother’s beachside home in gorgeous Coronado. As adults, Julia, Emily, and Nora aren’t particularly close, spread out across the country and busy with careers, relationships, and the minutia of life, but their promise to Grandma Vera keeps them anchored together, if only for one week every May.

Until one year when Julia, the oldest and most dependable sister, doesn’t show. And suddenly Nora and Emily start to question how much they truly knew about their sister’s life. Told in alternating points of view, spanning from their time together with Grandma Vera as kids into their adult lives, The May House explores how a decades-long family secret has unknowingly shaped each sister and, ultimately, how it brings them closer together.

Funny, poignant, and brimming with heart, The May House is an irresistible story about the special bond between sisters and figuring out what matters most in life, in all its ups and downs.

Release date: May 12, 2026

Publisher: Atria Books

Print pages: 368

Sample

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1
2019

AS IT TURNED OUT, Julia hadn’t gone to work for three whole weeks before anyone noticed she was missing.

But Emily and Nora wouldn’t know this yet when they first stepped foot inside the Ocean Boulevard house, that place all three of them thought of as the keeper of memories in their lives, both good and bad. They just knew that the Pacific Ocean air smelled so familiar, and the house itself felt strangely like home, even though they hadn’t spent more than one week a year here their entire lives.

It was a Sunday in May when Emily and Nora arrived in Coronado. (It was always a Sunday in May when they arrived these last thirty-some years.) And by coincidence (not coordination) their flights had arrived at the San Diego airport at similar times, and Emily and Nora had shared an Uber to the house. Emily had flown in from Florida, Nora from New York City. Their conversation on the twenty-minute car ride, through downtown and across the bridge, had been the habitual small talk of two women in their early forties with little in common. Had the Uber driver paid any attention, he might’ve been shocked to realize they were sisters. They didn’t really even look alike: tall Emily with her cropped white-blonde hair and hazel eyes; tiny Nora with her long, dark brown curls and green eyes. Except for the fact that they had the same exact chin and same exact left cheek dimple—all three of them did: Nora, Emily, and Julia. It was, in addition to the house on Ocean Boulevard, what they had inherited from Grandma Vera.

“Where’s Julia?” Nora asked, after they stepped inside and set their suitcases down in the living room.

The house was dark still, and Emily flipped on some lights. It felt like an exceedingly warm day for May, in a town known for the chill of “the May gray.” And she walked across the room to fiddle with the window air conditioner Nate had installed for them a few summers ago.

Nora ran upstairs to see if Julia was in her room. But it was dark up there too, her room looked untouched, and Julia’s suitcase was nowhere to be found. Julia wasn’t here yet. Nora ran back downstairs and reported this strange fact to Emily.

“Hmmm,” Emily said, as she let the air blast her neck. “I guess… she’s running late?” She noticed Nora seemed undaunted by the heat. Even having just run up and down the stairs, she didn’t appear sweaty at all. And Emily briefly wondered if, at forty-three, she was too young to be having a hot flash? Or was it that Nora was just used to being constantly overheated, performing under all those lights onstage?

“I’ll text her,” Nora said, pulling her phone from her designer bag. Which designer, Emily wasn’t all too sure, but she felt certain her younger sister’s purse was something trendy and definitely too expensive.

Julia, the oldest of the three of them, lived in Maryland, but she almost always managed to arrive first at the Ocean Boulevard house for their sisters’ week each May. Julia was also the planner. Usually, by the time Emily and Nora would walk in the door, Julia would have a spreadsheet of activities and dinners for the week ready to hand out. Emily, the middle sister, was the perpetual screwup. Nora, the youngest, was the flighty star. But, Julia, the oldest, held everything together. She somehow knew how to fill in the awkward spaces Emily and Nora never could on their own. They both already felt it was strange to be in this house without her.

Em and I are here, Nora texted. What time are you coming?

“Well?” Emily peered over Nora’s shoulder, and they both stared at the blank space on Nora’s screen, waiting for a response that didn’t immediately come.

“Maybe her flight got delayed and she’s in the air?” Nora scrolled up as if searching for some mysterious lost communication from her sister, and she could see the last text Julia had sent just to her. May 2018. This same week, last year.

What were you thinking?

Nora felt her cheeks reddening as she remembered what had happened right before that. She quickly moved her phone away, hoping Emily hadn’t seen it.

If she had, she wasn’t saying anything. Emily was fanning herself with her hand. “Global fucking warming, I swear. It never used to be this hot here in May.”

“Isn’t it hotter in Florida?” Nora asked, switching over to their sisters’ chat on her phone, scanning through the most recent messages. Now she noticed both she and Emily had sent their flight information a few weeks ago, but Julia hadn’t responded. The last text in their group chat from Julia was in January. She’d sent a picture of their niece, Veronica, standing in her dorm room after finally moving in. She’d gotten accepted off the waitlist last May, to her first-choice college, Adley, a small liberal arts school in Connecticut, but as a spring-semester start, which meant Julia had gotten to keep her at home a few months more than she’d originally expected: My baby at college, Julia wrote, in January, underneath the photo, with a crying emoji. Emily had loved the photo. Nora realized now she’d never responded. She had seen the photo when she was about to go onstage and then forgotten about it after the show. God, she was a terrible aunt.

“I don’t think the AC is working.” Emily stopped fanning herself to hold her hands in front of the unit. “It’s blowing warm air. I’ll go see if Nate is home and can come over here to fix it.”

Nora nodded, but the last thing she wanted to do was see Nate.

“Julia will probably be here by the time I get back,” Emily added hopefully.

“Probably,” Nora agreed. But something uneasy was already settling in her stomach, a creeping sense of uncertainty. And she realized it was the same feeling that had been hanging over her, vaguely, since she had left here last May. As if she, alone, had ruined everything.

The truth was, Emily was feeling uneasy too. Worry had been pushing up inside her ever since she’d left for the airport earlier, and now it was swimming to the surface, cresting in her chest like one of the waves that were just steps away at the beach.

But Julia would be here soon. She had to be.

They came every year. No matter what. It was a sisterly pact. And more important, a promise they had made to Grandma Vera that none of the three sisters had ever been willing to break, no matter what.