Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

Beach reads queen and conservationist Mary Alice Monroe will bring Lowcountry charm with her newest novel, The Summer Guests. Monroe weaves elements of the fragile coastal environment into her popular books. She has won numerous awards and her novel A Lowcountry Christmas won a 2017 Southern Book Prize for fiction. The Beach House was adapted into a Hallmark Channel Hall of Fame Movie, which premiered in 2018 and is available for check out on DVD. In The Summer Guests, an approaching hurricane drives an eclectic group of evacuees to seek shelter with friends in North Carolina, forcing them to resolve unsettled matters as they hunker down together.