Cottage by the Sea

After a mudslide sweeps through her family's Washington community, Annie Marlow is left to grieve alone: her parents, brother, sister-in-law and baby niece are all gone. Unable to face her old life, she leaves her physician-assistant job in Los Angeles and settles instead in Oceanside, the small Pacific Northwest town where her family once spent their summers, renting a cottage by the water.

In Oceanside, Annie takes work at the local clinic, befriends her guarded landlady Mellie, looks out for a troubled teenager named Britt, and grows close to Keaton, a steady local painter who helps her fix up the cottage. As she helps the town's other broken souls find their footing, Annie starts to believe she might too.

Cottage by the Sea, the first novel in Debbie Macomber's Oceanside series, is a tender story about grief, community and the slow work of learning to live again, inspired by the real 2014 Oso landslide in Washington State.