Some weddings are celebrations. Others become pressure cookers where years of buried resentment, grief, and longing finally erupt. Tenderness by Rowan Beaird uses that familiar emotional landscape to tell a slow-burning literary mystery that is far more interested in its characters than its mystery—and it’s all the stronger for it.
Releasing July 21, 2026, Tenderness transports readers to a secluded island off the coast of Virginia in the 1970s, where Shay O’Connor prepares to marry wealthy Andrew Pruitt after escaping the notorious Synanon cult. As family and friends gather for the wedding weekend, old relationships resurface, hidden truths begin to unravel, and the unsettling possibility that the cult has followed Shay threatens to turn the celebration into something much darker.
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