Winter Stroll

Hilderbrand’s Winter Street opens the four-book Winter Street series—followed by Winter Stroll, Winter Storms, and Winter Solstice—by immersing readers in the complicated, affectionate, and often chaotic lives of the Quinn family of Nantucket. The first novel establishes the central characters and the patterns and emotional dynamics that will shape the rest of the series, particularly the way the Quinns rely on Christmas traditions to steady themselves when personal crises erupt. Winter Street sets up the core emotional focus of the entire series as the Quinns survive not because their holidays are perfect, but because the holidays give them a reason to keep showing up for one another, even when everything else in their lives feels uncertain.

Winter Street begins at the Winter Street Inn, where Kelley Quinn, the family patriarch, is preparing for the inn’s busiest season. The Quinn family Christmas has always been elaborate and anchored with traditions like Kelley in his red pants, Mitzi insisting on a perfectly decorated tree, and the annual Christmas Eve party. But those rituals come crashing down when Kelley discovers that Mitzi, his wife of nearly two decades, has been having a long-running affair with George, the inn’s beloved Santa Claus. Mitzi’s emotional unraveling and her ultimate decision to leave Kelley for George rip a hole right through the center of the family’s holiday.

Around Kelley’s imploding marriage, each of the Quinn children faces their own crisis. Patrick, the eldest, is in freefall after being caught in an insider-trading scandal; his wife Jennifer is left trying to hold their household together while he navigates the early stages of a legal nightmare. Ava, the steady, capable middle child, is miserable in her relationship with a boyfriend who takes her for granted. Kevin, the youngest of Quinn’s sons, has finally begun to turn his life around. He’s fallen in love with Isabelle, who is now pregnant with their daughter, but Kevin’s past mistakes still shadow him and make him doubt he deserves the life he is building. Even the youngest child, Bart, who appears only at a distance as a newly enlisted Marine deployed in Afghanistan, casts a shadow of worry over the family; his absence becomes one of the central emotional threads of the entire series. Winter Stroll builds on this narrative foundation and explores the pull between the chaos of their individual lives and the stabilizing force of their shared traditions at the Winter Street Inn.