Photographer Annie Collinge's shots exploring the home and local neighborhood of Liza Klaussmann on the island of Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, accompany the novelist's exclusive reading from her much-hyped debut Tigers in Red Weather. The New York Times journalist and great-great-great-granddaughter of Moby Dick author Herman Melville spent all of her childhood summers on the New England vacation mecca favored by the US political elite, notably the Obamas, Clintons and the Kennedy clan. The subject of a bidding war between eight publishing houses that saw Picador clinching the rights in a six-figure deal, Tigers in Red Weather traces the lives of a complicated New England family through the eyes of five intriguing characters. Spanning the postwar period through to the swinging 60s, the novel is awash with gin and tonics and balmy afternoons, with an unlikely murder mystery thrown in for good measure. “Martha’s Vineyard is so idyllic. White picket fences, American flags; everyone goes to the club together, everyone wears the same thing, everyone does that same stuff,” says Klaussman. “The flipside is that it can be really homogeneous and stifling. It makes for a good place to turn on its head.”

Tigers in Red Weather is published by Little Brown in the US and Picador in the UK.