The Second Home by Kathryn Sharman review

About The Book

Book: The Second Home
Author: Kathryn Sharman
Standalone or Series: Standalone
Publisher: Hodder  & Stoughton
Publication Date (UK): 28th May 2026

🔍Standout Read. Awarded to books I highly recommend.

My Review

Sharman relocates to the South Coast for her second domestic thriller.

Think sea, sun, sandcastles, seagulls and second homes. The plague of cursed Airbnb lock boxes littering every house façade. An absolutely stunning, tranquil place that has sadly become uninhabitable for most locals. With many second homes empty for months on end, work is scarce due to the lack of community, and towns become ghost towns over the winter months, with many unable to afford to live there.

The story centres around Lottie, Tim and their young son, who have scraped together their public sector wages to afford a week by the sea in a rental holiday home. They arrive to find the vacant property next door is undergoing a huge, noisy renovation. This belongs to the Woolf family, comprising Tobias, Olivia and their two teenage/young adult children.

Lottie is strong-willed and more than happy to go head-to-head with Tobias over the disruptive building works. It’s not just the two families at war though. We meet many local characters with their own struggles and feelings about what’s happening to their hometown.

As the story unravels through multiple points of view, it’s when we get Lottie and Tobias’s perspectives in particular that we see the real stark contrast. They are polar opposites and approach everything completely differently. We see each of them encounter the same locals but describe them in different ways. Whereas Lottie identifies the signs of hard work, Tobias sees only failure, that they are too old to be working and should have retired. An irony, given that Tobias himself is not quite as wealthy as he would like to appear.

The book starts with a foreshadowing prologue, so we know that everything is going to come to an explosive head with a fireworks celebration. Until then, it’s a simmering pot as the tension builds quicker than the Woolf’s reno and we learn more about what’s really going on and the histories of each family.

A fantastic second novel from Sharman. It’s published in May, so for now, if you haven’t already, I wholeheartedly recommend her debut The Family at No. 23, which was wonderfully twisty! You can read my review for that [here].

Thank you to Hodder & Stoughton and NetGalley for the ARC.