Elin Hilderbrand is an American published author, known for writing romance novels. Many of her novels are set on or close to Nantucket Island, which she is very familiar with as she resides there. She is a New York Times best-selling author. She is also the writer of the tv series The Perfect Couple, 28 Summers, and Winter in Paradise.
Elin is married and has three children with her husband. They all live together on Nantucket.
The author was born in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where she grew up. Elin attended Johns Hopkins University, from which she graduated. She also attended the graduate fiction Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, where she was a teaching and writing fellow.
Before she settled down on Nantucket, Elin traveled quite a bit. Nantucket has been cast as the setting for many of her novels. Hilderbrand was named the queen of beach reads by New York Magazine in 2019.
Her Paradise trilogy is being adapted into a television series by ABC that plans to star Ellen Pompeo.
The author spent many of her summers hanging out in Cape Cod, something that she has fond memories of. She recalls spending time with family, collecting sea glass on the beach, playing touch football when low tide came, digging through pools to find hermit crabs, and swimming out to the raft off of the shore. That ended when her father passed away in a plane crash when she was just sixteen years old.
The author spent the next summer busy at her new job, working doing piecework for a factory that generated Halloween costumes. She made a promise to herself that for the rest of her life, her goal would be to have a genuine summer. In July of 1993, she moved to Nantucket. She was able to get a job writing the classified ads and later began writing her fictional novels.
Her first books were released by St. Martin’s Press. She then made the transition to having her books published by Little, Brown and Company with her book A Summer Affair in 2008. Her first murder mystery was titled The Perfect Couple and came out in 2018.
She got married to her husband Chip Cunningham in 1995 in Massachusetts. The pair would get divorced in 2015, and they continue to share three children together. In 2014, Elin went through the trying process of having a double mastectomy.
Winter In Paradise is the first novel in the Paradise series by Elin Hilderbrand. If you love beach reads or anything engaging, check out this novel that lets you spend the hard days of winter mentally whisked away and tanning on a beach in the Caribbean!
If you love reading books set in paradise, you will love this novel. Elin takes readers to the beautiful beaches of St. John for the start of her Paradise series. This book has everything that you could want from a book by Hilderbrand, with an additional helping of intrigue to top it off.
Main character Irene Steele has just about everything that you could ever want in life. She has the perfect house, the perfect husband, and the perfect family. Everything is just as idyllic as it should be, and her life is the envy of many. But all of that is destined to change in one singular moment that she can’t take back.
Everything that she knows goes to pieces when a phone call comes late at night and wakes her up. News that late usually isn’t good, and she finds out that the worst has happened. The husband that she loved so much has been discovered dead. It’s so out of left field that Irene can barely process the news.
The last thing that she expected was to get the news that her beloved spouse is dead. Before she can even process how she feels, she must take in the details of how her husband died. The strange thing is that he was discovered on St. John Island, which is a beautiful place but very different from the suburban surroundings that she lives in. Her husband used to live there too, but now that is over, a fact that Irene is still wrapping her head around.
She has no idea what her husband was doing in a tropical paradise like that, but she intends to find out. She decides to go down to the area to find out what she can. It’s not all bad– she at least gets to escape from the frigid winter temperatures. Irene takes a flight to the Caribbean beach area, but once she gets there, she finds out something shocking and that she was not ready for at all.
It turns out that her much-loved husband had been living with a secret. He had a second family that he kept hidden from his wife. Irene can’t believe it, and he’s dead, so she can’t even confront him. She decides to look into the circumstances of her husband’s passing, she finds herself in the middle of a web of deceit. St. John’s might be paradise, but it also hides a lot of secrets.
What will Irene find out about how her husband passed? Or will she discover that her husband’s death will forever be a mystery? Find out by reading the first book in the Paradise series!
What Happens in Paradise is the second novel in the Paradise series by Elin Hilderbrand. If you liked the first book in the series, then check out this follow-up where new love and secret lives come out on the shores of the Caribbean.
Irene Steele went through the biggest surprise one could get a year prior when she found out that her husband, the man who had served as a father and was a thriving businessman, had died. It turned out that he’d been killed in a helicopter crash. However, that was not the only thing that she found out. Irene discovered that St. John was the location where he had settled in to live another life, with another woman by his side.
It all came to a shock to her, but she managed to get over it somewhat. Now she’s returned to St. John with her sons, wanting to find out the truth about her former husband. But little do they know that they’re about to find out some things about their lives and their futures too. What will they discover? Read What Happens in Paradise to find out!
Book Series In Order » Characters » Paradise (Elin Hilderbrand)
