Return to Summerhouse

Return to Summerhouse is a novel by the American writer Jude Deveraux, published by Pocket Books in 2008. It is set in a house in Maine whose owner, Madame Zoya, has a reputation for granting the innermost wishes of the people who come to stay there, and it brings three women to her at once.

Amy appears to have a perfect marriage and family and is hiding a loss inside it. Faith is a widow in her thirties still grieving a man she loved years earlier. Zoe is an artist shunned by the town she grew up in after a traumatic night erased her memory of what happened.

Zoya intends to send the three of them to eighteenth-century England, where Amy's ancestry can be altered, and to let each of the others try to reach the part of her past she would most like to change. The novel sets the women's stories alongside each other and lets them find that a second attempt at an old decision carries its own costs, and that the thing they want to change is not always the thing that needs changing.