Join us as Ocean House owner and award-winning author Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with our featured author, Wilbur Ross, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

About the Author: Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. served as Secretary of Commerce in the Trump administration following 55 years of experience in investment banking and private equity. In this capacity, he advised President Donald Trump on commercial and economic affairs and helped American entrepreneurs and businesses create jobs and economic opportunity.

A native of North Bergen, New Jersey, Ross spent a significant portion of his business career at Rothschild, Inc. Ross negotiated on behalf of creditors in some of the highest-profile bankruptcy proceedings in history, including those involving Pan Am, TWA, Texaco, and Drexel Burnham Lambert. After founding his own private equity firm in 2000, Ross purchased and restored many companies to profitability, including those in the steel, coal, textile, and banking industries. Over the course of his career, Ross restructured more than $400 billion in assets, earning him a distinguished reputation on Wall Street. In 2011, Bloomberg Markets named him one of the 50 most influential people in global finance.

Secretary Ross’s philanthropic work has included significant support for the Japan Society, the Brookings Institution, the Blenheim Foundation, and numerous entities devoted to the fine arts, including the Rene Magritte Museum in Brussels. He was also a member of the advisory board of the Yale University School of Management.

Secretary Ross is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Business School. He and his wife, Hilary Geary Ross, have four children.

Before being named President Trump’s Secretary of Commerce in 2017, Wilbur Ross had already earned a reputation as the “King of Bankruptcy” over his 55-year career on Wall Street. Often working on high-profile bankruptcies such as Pan Am and Texaco, Ross helped restructure more than $400 billion in assets, and was named among Bloomberg’s 50 most influential people in global finance. After coming to Washington, Ross faced equally tough challenges, yet survived in his post for all four years.

About The Book: Creating Success in Business and Life explains how Ross got to the top and stayed there. Rising from humble beginnings in North Bergen, New Jersey, Ross applied simple principles with strict discipline—something readers can apply in their own quest for success. Ultimately, Ross’s strategies and dealmaking skills led to relationships with King Charles, Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn, the Rothschild family, Steve Wynn, Lakshmi Mittal, Mike Milken, and many other famous personalities. Ross also documents his experiences with President Trump in the Oval Office.

Whether you’re interested in Ross’ experiences as a neighbor of John Lennon in the legendary Dakota apartment building, celebrating with Sir Richard Branson on his private island, or his tumultuous time in Washington, you will find Risks and Returns to be a candid reflection of a life lived at the pinnacle of Wall Street, New York, and Palm Beach society, and the Trump administration. Above all, anyone driven to find career success will learn from Ross’ life the strategies and mentality to achieve it.

Please find out more about Wilbur Ross and his book at www.risksandreturns.net. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com

Join us as Ocean House owner and award-winning author Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with our featured author, Lisa Genova, a N.Y. Times bestselling author.

About the Author: Lisa Genova graduated valedictorian, summa cum laude, from Bates College with a degree in Biopsychology and has a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard University.

​Acclaimed as the Oliver Sacks of fiction and the Michael Crichton of brain science, Lisa has captured a special place in contemporary fiction, writing stories that are equally inspired by neurological conditions and our shared human condition. She is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels STILL ALICE, LEFT NEGLECTED, LOVE ANTHONY, and INSIDE THE O'BRIENS.

Her first work of nonfiction, REMEMBER: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Her newest novel, MORE OR LESS MADDY, was released in January 2025 and became an instant #1 bestseller in Canada.

About The Book: A “riveting page-turner” (Jean Kwok, New York Times bestselling author of Searching for Sylvie Lee) about a young woman diagnosed with bipolar disorder who rejects the stability and approval found in a traditionally “normal” life for a career in stand-up comedy.

Maddy Banks is just like any other stressed-out freshman at NYU. Between schoolwork, exams, navigating life in the city, and a recent breakup, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t help that she’s always felt like the odd one out in her picture-perfect Connecticut family. But Maddy’s latest low is devastatingly low, convincing her to go on an antidepressant. She begins to feel good, dazzling good in fact, and she soon spirals high into a wild and terrifying mania that culminates in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

As she struggles to find her way in this new reality, navigating the complex effects bipolar has on her identity, her relationships, and her life dream, Maddy will have to figure out how to manage being both too much and not enough.

With her signature “deep empathy and insight” (Booklist), Harvard-trained neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author Lisa Genova has crafted an “affecting, harrowing, beautiful, and enlightening” (Shelf Awareness) novel that makes complicated mental health issues accessible and human. More or Less Maddy is destined to become another classic like Still Alice.

Please find out more about Lisa Genova and her books at lisagenova.com. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com

Join us as Ocean House owner and award-winning author Deborah Goodrich Royce moderates a conversation with our featured author, Beatriz Williams, a N.Y. Times bestselling author.

About the Author: Beatriz Williams is the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author of Husbands and Lovers, The Summer Wives, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, the Wicked City series, and several other works of historical fiction, including five novels in collaboration with fellow bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before her first novel was published in 2012. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives in southeastern Connecticut with her husband and four mostly-grown children.

About The Book: A devastating secret haunts the women of an old New England family in this rich new novel set on Winthrop Island. Audrey Fisher has struggled all her life to emerge from the shadow of her famous mother by forging a career as a world-class chef. Meredith Fisher’s glamorous screen persona disguises the trauma of the tragic accident that haunts her dreams. Neither woman wants to return to the New England island they left behind and its complicated emotional ties, but Meredith has one last chance to sober up and salvage her big comeback, and where else but discreet, moneyed Winthrop Island can a famous actress spend the summer without the intrusion of other people? Until Audrey discovers an old wooden chest among the belongings of her estranged father—Mike Kennedy, proprietor of the island’s only watering hole—and the astonishing contents draw the women deep into Winthrop’s past and its many secrets . . . attracting the interest of their handsome neighbor, Sedge Peabody. How did a trove of paintings from one of America’s greatest artists wind up in the cellar of the Mohegan Inn? And who is the mysterious woman portrayed on every canvas?

On a stormy November night in 1846, Providence Dare flees Boston and boards the luxury steamship Atlantic one step ahead of the law….or so she believes. But when a catastrophic accident leaves the ship at the mercy of a mighty gale, Providence finds herself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the one man who knows her real identity—the detective investigating the suspicious death of her employer, the painter Henry Irving. As the Atlantic fights for her life and the rocky shore of Winthrop Island edges closer, a desperate Providence searches for her chance to escape…before the sea swallows her without a trace.

In Under the Stars, the destinies of three women converge across centuries, as a harrowing true disaster at the dawn of the steamship era evokes a complex legacy of family secrets in modern day New England.

Find out more about Beatriz Williams and her books at beatrizwilliams.com. For details on Deborah Goodrich Royce and the Ocean House Author Series, visit deborahgoodrichroyce.com