On a dazzling afternoon last week, the sun baked the tidal flats in Southwest Harbor. Golfers at the nearby Causeway Club sweltered in the heat. But a sea breeze cooled things down just enough to make porch-sitting comfortable.

And porch-sitting is exactly what author Christina Baker Kline had in mind. At her sister’s home, she laid out a spread of sandwiches and curled up on a wicker chair. Her springer spaniel, Lucy, sat patiently at her feet as she sipped iced tea and talked about Mount Desert Island with reverence.

For Kline, a Bangor High School grad who now calls Montclair, N.J., home, the island is her retreat and her muse. For the heroine of her newest novel, “The Way Life Should Be” (William Morrow, $24.95), MDI has a similar allure – even in December.

“I love this island so much,” Kline said. “I actually love it in the winter as much as I do in the summer.”

The novel, which comes out tomorrow, follows Angela Russo, a 33-year-old Manhattanite stuck in a big city rut. Though cooking is her passion, she has chosen a more practical, if less fulfilling career as an event planner. She dreams of a simpler, happier life in Maine, a place she has never visited – “as unreal a place as Middle Earth.”

After a comical series of events leaves her unemployed, she packs up her old Honda Civic and heads Down East in search of a more meaningful life – and a steamy guy she met on the Internet.

But Mr. Right turns out to be Mr. Right Now. And Angela begins to fall in love with the island – with its bewitching landscape and quirky characters – instead.

“This novel is very much about place – it’s steeped in place,” Kline, 43, said.

So, too, is its author. The child of Bill and Tina Baker, Kline was born in Cambridge, England, where her father was a student. She spent much of her early childhood in North Carolina and Tennessee, and in 1970, the Bakers moved their family – Christina is the oldest of four daughters – to a spacious Victorian in Bangor. Bill and Tina both taught at the University of Maine.

“Because my parents have Southern accents and we had English accents at that time, it took us a while to figure out who we were, where we fit in this world,” Kline recalled.

Though “The Way Life Should Be” is not autobiographical, elements of Kline’s life weave their way into the story. Many of her characters are inspired by friends and acquaintances, and they, too are trying to figure out where they fit in this world. They find their way in the long, lonely winter months.

“The winter to me is when the connections between people really happen,” Kline said. “The kind of people who live here year-round – that’s what fascinates me. People live here for all kinds of reasons, and that means it’s an incredibly diverse community of all kinds of people in this one spot. In some ways, it’s like Manhattan.”

That said, “The Way Life Should Be” doesn’t read like it’s written by a New Yorker who spends one week a summer here. Kline skips the weird accents that abound in fiction set Down East. When Angela’s Maine squeeze says “a-yuh,” his voice drips with sarcasm. Every detail – from the sandwiches at Ellsworth’s Riverside Caf? to the random merchandise at Marden’s – rings true.

As it should. Kline has been smitten with the island, and Southwest Harbor in particular, for more than a decade. She came to town for a reading of “Sweet Water,” her first published novel. At the time, her parents had been thinking about buying a house, preferably on the water, that would become a family gathering place. After her reading, Christina called them and said, “This is where you have to come.”

In Tremont, the Bakers found an old, rundown house – there was a hole in the kitchen floor where a squatter had lit a fire – and restored it into a year-round home. All four sisters and their families started spending summers in the area, and soon, Christina, her husband, David, and their three boys were coming to the island in the winter months, as well. One of her sisters, Clara, has since settled on the island with her own family.

“I wanted to describe what it means to live in a place where thousands of people come for vacation. You brace yourselves for the onslaught in the summer, and by September, there’s some kind of relief,” Kline said. “I didn’t want to give an idealized picture of what it’s like here.”

To that end, Angela lives in a shack, which is neither warm nor charming. But with a little help from Marden’s and Wal-Mart, she turns it into a home and begins to craft a life for herself here. She finds work in a coffeeshop, and its owner – a sassy, gay Australian man – becomes her new best friend. She also rekindles her love for cooking, and before long, she’s whipping up Pasta e Fagioli and Risotto with Seafood in her tiny kitchen. As a bonus, Kline includes the recipes, which she learned from an Italian restaurateur near her New Jersey home.

“I wanted Angela to be at the stage in her life where in some ways, if she didn’t make a great leap now, she probably wasn’t going to do it,” Kline said. “In this case, I just wanted to show the journey of a woman who sort of fell into this, but she fell into this because she had all these elements of change bubbling up inside her.”

Kline says the first half of the novel has elements of “chick lit” or romantic comedy, but the greater themes of “The Way Life Should Be” have a deeper resonance. It is a lighter turn for Baker, whose previous novels, “Still Water” and “Desire Lines,” explore the murkier terrain of love, loss and family ties. In addition, Kline has written and edited several works of nonfiction.

She recently became writer in residence at Fordham University in the Bronx. In addition, she just completed her fourth novel, “Four Way Stop,” which centers on two couples whose marriages dissolve in the aftermath of a tragic accident. It is scheduled to be published in 2008. For now, she’s enjoying her time with Angela Russo – a character who is creating her own happy ending.

“Part of what this book is about is letting go of the quest for the perfect life,” Kline said. “It’s about figuring out what living a meaningful, fulfilling life is. That may be different from what you imagined and it may be different from what other people told you it is.”

And that’s the way life should be.

Author appearances and readings

11 a.m.-1 p.m. Tuesday, July 31, Port in a Storm Bookstore?s ?Portside Branch,? Bernard

9:30-11:30 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 2, Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor

1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 4, Bookstacks, Bucksport

9:30-11:30 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 9, Southwest Harbor Public Library, Southwest Harbor

2 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 11, Borders Books and Music, Bangor

7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 15, Northeast Harbor Public Library, Northeast Harbor

7 p.m. Friday, Aug. 17, Sherman?s Books & Stationery, Bar Harbor

7-9 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 25, Sherman?s, Camden

For more information, visit www.christinabakerkline.com