"Under the Stars," Beatriz Williams

 



Photo: the cover of the book.  This book, published by Ballantine Books, will go on sale Tuesday, July 29. At 6:30 that evening, Beatriz will give a talk at R.J. Julia in Madison, CT. Check her website – www.beatrizwilliams.com – for other visits she will be making over the next couple of months.  

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

 

Burrowing into Books

Under the Stars, Beatriz Williams

July 26, 2025

 

“All of my books examine the infinite skein of threads that connects us to our past…”

                                                                                                                 Beatriz Williams, “Author’s Note”

                                                                                                                 Under the Stars 

 

A caveat: Beatriz is our daughter-in-law and mother of four of our grandchildren.

 

In his novel, Death in the Dordogne Martin Walker wrote: “It’s funny how the past never quite goes away.”

Beatriz exemplifies that self-evident observation. She has a skill for bringing the past forward into the present. And she does so again in this novel that mostly takes place on Winthrop Island, her fictionalized version of Fishers Island, the location of her last novel, Husbands and Lovers.

 

While my grandparents would have winced at the language of waspish Audrey, her voice, nevertheless, rings true. And some early passages, especially those of Meredith in her libidinous youth, will send your sex hormones soaring. At one point I had to put aside the book and jump into a cold shower.

 

As in many of her novels, an historical incident serves as catalyst to the story. In this case, it is the wreck of the steamship Atlantic off Fishers Island on Thanksgiving Day 1846. Shewas the largest and most luxurious steamships on Long Island Sound, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt for his Norwich and New London Steamship Company. Her keel had been laid in November of the previous year. As the Atlantic left Norwich just after midnight on Thanksgiving Day, a storm was brewing. With about a hundred people aboard, the gale worsened as she left New London. Near Bartlett’s Reef lighthouse her boiler blew and her lines snapped, carrying the ship, rudder-less, toward the rocky, northwest corner of Fishers Island. It was in the early morning hours of the next day the ship was wrecked, killing an estimated forty-two people. 

 

Two of the passengers and key to her story, Providence Dare and John Starkweather, are products of Beatriz’s imagination. The rest, including Captain Dunstan who died in the wreck, are real.

 

Like all her books, Beatriz incorporates different time periods – November 1846, as well as the summers of 1993 and 2024. We come to know the Hollywood film star Meredith Fisher in 1993 on Winthrop Island where she had been raised, and then again upon her return to the island to dry out in 2024. The second time she is accompanied by her mid-20s daughter Audrey (an aspiring chef and the one with “the sarcasm gene”). Audrey expects to be there only three-months. Her role – to keep her mother from temptations of the bottle. 

 

The beauty in this story is how Beatriz connects history – from a mid-19^th Century murder in Boston and a ship wreck on Long Island Sound – to disparate lives, past and present: a famous artist, an Irish maid, and a private detective from the 19^th Century, to characters of the past thirty years, including Meredith, Audrey, Audrey’s new friend, handsome summer resident Sedgewick Peadbody, and Mike Kennedy, Meredith’s boyfriend of thirty years ago (Audrey’s dad?). Kennedy, owner of the Mohegan Inn, is a year-round resident of the island. (Readers will remember him from Husbands and Lovers.)

 

Beatriz has a talent for writing scenes that cause the reader to rush through the pages, especially as the story nears its climax. A story of three women: Providence, Meredith and Audrey, this is a perfect summer read.