Below is the complete list of Jude Deveraux’s The Summerhouse books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of The Summerhouse Books
About The Summerhouse
Jude Deveraux’s Summerhouse series blends contemporary women’s fiction, romance, friendship, and fantasy through stories about women given an extraordinary opportunity to revisit the choices that shaped their lives. Beginning with The Summerhouse, the series is built around the possibility of looking backward with adult knowledge and asking a deceptively difficult question: if you could change a crucial moment in your past, would you—and would the consequences actually produce the life you wanted?
The Summerhouse introduces three women—Leslie Headrick, Madison Appleby, and Ellie Abbott—who first meet as young adults while applying for jobs in New York City. Their lives subsequently take very different directions, but they reunite years later to celebrate their shared birthday at a summerhouse in Maine.
By that point, each woman has accumulated disappointments and unanswered questions. The futures they once imagined have not unfolded as expected, and their reunion becomes an opportunity to examine marriages, careers, families, lost possibilities, and the decisions that brought them to their present circumstances.
The novel changes direction when they encounter Madame Zoya, whose supernatural abilities offer something far more significant than ordinary advice. Each woman can return to an earlier point in her life and experience what might have happened had she made different choices. Deveraux uses the fantasy premise not simply to rewrite romantic histories but to examine how a single decision can affect careers, friendships, families, and personal identity.
Return to Summerhouse revisits the concept with a new group of women rather than simply continuing the lives of Leslie, Madison, and Ellie. Amy, Faith, and Zoë arrive with their own histories and regrets, and the supernatural mechanism again allows the past to become something that can be experienced rather than merely remembered.
The second novel expands the possibilities of the premise. Instead of treating time travel as an uncomplicated means of correcting mistakes, Deveraux emphasizes how difficult it can be to determine which moment actually needs changing. What appears from the present to have been a disastrous decision may have produced valuable consequences, while apparently minor events can turn out to have shaped an entire life.
As You Wish continues and broadens the Summerhouse idea through Olivia, Kathy, and Elise, women from different generations who find themselves together at a summerhouse in Maine. Despite differences in age and experience, all three have reached points where the lives they are living do not match what they once hoped for themselves.
Their stories allow Deveraux to examine how expectations imposed by marriage, family, social convention, and personal insecurity can influence major decisions. As in the earlier books, the possibility of returning to the past creates the fantasy framework, but the emotional focus remains on understanding why the women made their original choices and whether changing events is enough to change who they have become.
The Summerhouse novels are unusual within Deveraux’s bibliography because friendship among women is at least as important as romantic love. The protagonists help one another interpret their lives, often seeing possibilities and patterns that the person directly involved cannot recognize. The shared retreat creates a space outside ordinary responsibilities where those conversations can occur.
The supernatural elements also connect the series thematically with other Deveraux novels involving time travel, destiny, and second chances, most famously A Knight in Shining Armor. In Summerhouse, however, traveling through time is less about bringing lovers from different centuries together than about confronting the paths not taken.
The books are best read in publication order, beginning with The Summerhouse, followed by Return to Summerhouse and As You Wish. Each volume has its own principal group of women and can largely stand alone, but the recurring concept and connections between the stories are clearer when encountered sequentially.
At its heart, the Summerhouse series treats regret as more complicated than wishing for a different past. Deveraux gives her characters the fantasy of doing what real people cannot—going back and trying again—but the deeper question is what they bring home afterward. Changing one decision may alter a life, yet understanding that decision can be just as transformative.