From the beloved author of The Divorcées comes a novel set in the 1970s during an island wedding, where the bride has recently left a sinister cult that might still be trailing her.
TENDERNESS
by Rowan Beaird
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, July 2026
On a remote island off the coast of Virginia, family and friends gather to celebrate the wedding of Shay O’Connor and Andrew Pruitt. From the moment the guests arrive, all they can whisper about is the bride, who recently left the headline-making cult Synanon. Why would someone like Shay, an Ivy League graduate with a wealthy, doting fiancée, join Synanon? And has she really escaped their grasp?
Told from the interwoven perspectives of Shay’s brother William, her longtime friend Joel, and Shay herself, Tenderness is a slow-burn mystery that excavates dark family histories and romantic regrets. As the wedding day approaches, Joel and William pull at the loose threads of Shay’s story, and it becomes clear there is an even greater threat on the island than the secrets each character is keeping from one another.
Set in the tinderbox of the 1970s, Tenderness is a lit match, bringing hidden truths to light and asking if we can ever see ourselves or the people we love for who they truly are.
Rowan Beaird’s fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Gulf Coast. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter. She is the author of the acclaimed novel The Divorcées (Flatiron, 2024).
Today, Shazam is one of the most iconic and widely used apps in the world, with a brand name so recognizable that it has become a verb. But what few people know is that it was invented before smartphones existed. Chris dreamed up Shazam in 1999, when people were still buying CDs and carrying around portable CD players with wired headsets. There was no Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and certainly no App Store. The closest thing to streaming music was the illegal sharing of digital files on platforms like Napster. There was no Facebook, Instagram, or even Myspace. Chris’s idea, that anyone, anywhere, could use their phone to identify a song playing in the background, sounded like science fiction. More than 100 experts told him it couldn’t be done, but Chris refused to give up. Instead, he assembled a dream team of brilliant minds—engineers, scientists, and business thinkers—who shared his vision (after some persuasion). United by a shared sense of purpose and determination, they set out to build the impossible from scratch. Together, they would develop the technology that would power the world’s first AI-driven consumer tool, years before anyone had even heard the word “app.” What followed was an eighteen-year odyssey marked by near-bankruptcy, groundbreaking innovation, sabotage, fierce competition with behemoths like Google and Sony, and bitter internal battles among team members. Through every setback and betrayal, Chris never gave up on his vision, and he continued to fight to keep Shazam on course. In the end, the idea that no one thought could work became a global phenomenon. This is more than a tech success story. It’s a deeply human, often emotional narrative about vision, grit, and the power of believing in the impossible.
In the farm fields surrounding Sault Ste. Marie, a border town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, time seems to stand still. Summer, the sun scalds the local boys’ necks as they bale hay for cash. Winter, the girls bundle up against the cold and jostle through the high school halls like trailered sheep.