When a spur of the moment decision catapults Katie Doyle from her lakeside Oregon town to spend the summer in the Hamptons, she is hoping for summer employment, new friends for her young son, and a chance to explore a new love affair with a dazzling colleague. What she finds is a strange cocktail of classes, where society’s one-percenters vacation alongside local people who’ve lived in the Hamptons for generations. Though she’s looking forward to their move, Katie can’t help but feel a little nervous and wonder if she will be accepted by her new boyfriend’s circles and granted entry into the East Coast elite. But as she soon discovers, Southampton isn’t all that it seems to be on the surface—and neither are the people who live there. As George takes Katie on a whirlwind tour of country clubs, haute couture, and lavish events, she is amazed to see how sudden whims become dire needs, extra-marital relations are de rigueur, and how people purchase friends and loyalties like a pair of shoes. Even the middle-class townspeople maintain a faƯcade as they maneuver among the wealthy summer invaders trampling on their roots. The more Katie becomes immersed, the more she learns the stories and secrets of both the upstairs and downstairs, the upper crust and middle of the road. When she meets Luke, a local surfer, and teacher who makes her question herself and what it is she really wants, she realizes the life she’s begun for herself is built on shifting Hamptons’ dunes.