Husbands & Lovers Published by Random House on April 15, 2025 Genres: Fiction / Historical / General, Fiction / Romance / Contemporary, Fiction / Women
Pages: 384
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Reading Challenges: 2026 Audiobook Challenge, All booksTwo women—separated by decades and continents, and united by an exotic family heirloom—reclaim secrets and lost loves in this sweeping novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wives.
“My favorite kind of page-turner—unputdownable!”—Martha Hall Kelly, author of The Golden DovesNew England, 2022. Three years ago, single mother Mallory Dunne received the telephone call every parent dreads—her ten-year-old son, Sam, had been airlifted from summer camp with acute poisoning from a toxic death cap mushroom, leaving him fighting for his life. Now, searching for the donor kidney that will give her son a chance for a normal life, Mallory’s forced to confront two harrowing secrets from her past: her mother’s adoption from an infamous Irish orphanage in 1952, and her own all-consuming summer romance fourteen years earlier with her childhood best friend, Monk Adams— one of the world’s most beloved singer-songwriters—a fairy tale cut short by a devastating betrayal.
Cairo, 1951. After suffering tragedy beyond comprehension in the war, Hungarian refugee Hannah Ainsworth has forged a respectable new life for herself—marriage to a wealthy British diplomat with a coveted posting in glamorous Cairo. But a fateful encounter with the enigmatic manager of a hotel bristling with spies leads to a passionate affair that will reawaken Hannah’s longing for everything she once lost. As revolution simmers in the Egyptian streets, a pregnant Hannah finds herself snared in a game of intrigue between two men . . . and an act of sacrifice that will echo down the generations.
Timeless and bittersweet, Husbands & Lovers takes readers on an unforgettable journey of heartbreak and redemption, from the revolutionary fires of midcentury Egypt to the moneyed beaches of contemporary New England. Acclaimed author Beatriz Williams has written a poignant and beautifully voiced novel of deeply human characters entangled by morally complex issues—of privilege, class, and the female experience—inside worlds brought shimmeringly to life.
I love a good historical dual-timeline story, and Husbands & Lovers absolutely delivered! Husbands & Lovers was my first book by Beatriz Williams, and it was such a treat.
In the modern timeline, we follow two sisters desperate to find a way to save one sister’s son, which leads to the discovery that their mother was adopted from Egypt. At the same time, the historical timeline takes us into their grandmother’s life and the events that eventually led to their mother’s birth. I loved watching these two stories slowly come together and uncovering the family secrets connecting them.
There’s plenty of family drama along the way, too. The mother of the sick child has to reconnect with his father—a very famous man who never even knew he had a son. That adds an entirely different emotional complication to an already difficult situation.
I was completely invested in both timelines, which isn’t always the case for me with dual-timeline books. The mix of history, romance, family secrets, and complicated relationships kept me turning the pages. For my first Beatriz Williams book, this was a fantastic introduction to her writing, and I’ll definitely be reading more!
5 stars — a beautifully layered family story that gave me everything I love about historical dual timelines.
About Beatriz Williams
Beatriz Williams is a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before she turned her attention to writing novels that combine her passion for history with an obsessive devotion to voice and characterization. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world.
Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives near the Connecticut shore with her husband and four children, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.
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