The Santorini Light

Audrey Herrick has a story for you, and you should probably clear your evening.

As the founder of The Departure Lounge, Audrey has sent hundreds of women to the most beautiful places on earth. Most came back with better tans. Some came back with better lives. And one of them, a twenty-eight-year-old wedding photographer who had not pointed a camera at anything she loved in over a year, came back from a Greek island with sand in her good shoes, a photograph she took for herself for the first time in longer than she would admit, and a man who runs a boat he is too afraid to finish.

Bree Lawson is the best wedding photographer in Nashville, and she has perfected one quiet trick: she gives everyone else the light and stands in the dark behind the glass, where nothing can reach her and she cannot reach anything back. Then a destination wedding on Santorini hands her a bride unraveling under the weight of her late mother's expectations, a meltemi wind determined to throw the entire ceremony off a four-hundred-foot cliff, and Nico, a maddeningly easygoing local fixer who refuses to move a table three inches and somehow sees straight through her in about a day and a half.

What follows is a white-knuckle donkey ride up three hundred steps, a grandmother who diagnoses Bree as too thin and treats it with octopus and zero consent, a sunset proposal that becomes a logistical war crime, a wedding that has to be rescued by boat to the one cove on the island the wind cannot reach, and a woman who, standing at the center of the most beautiful thing she has ever been hired to photograph, finally lowers the camera and lets herself be in the picture.

For readers who love a slow-burn grumpy-sunshine romance, a heroine who is competent at everything except being happy, a cast of locals who feed you whether you like it or not, and a setting so vivid you will start pricing flights around chapter four.

The Departure Lounge: every love story starts with a destination.