Martha’s Vineyard is all over E. Lockhart’s novels. It’s in the fudge and bookstores of her 2014 bestselling young adult novel We Were Liars and the lobster socks and touristy T-shirts of the prequel, Family of Liars.

It’s especially prominent in her third novel in the series, We Fell Apart, which comes out this fall. The recent TV adaptation of We Were Liars on Amazon Prime, however, was filmed in Canada.

“Everybody on Martha’s Vineyard will know that we did not film it here,” Ms. Lockhart said. “There were inadequate waves.”

E. Lockhart is  a longtime summer Vineyarder. Recently, she sat down with the Gazette to discuss her previous and upcoming projects, her experience in higher education and her time spent on the Vineyard.

We Were Liars is part romance, part thriller with a gut-wrenching twist ending, set on the wealthy Sinclair family’s fictional private island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Cadence Sinclair and her cousins are teenagers navigating love, inheritance, lies and a tragic accident over multiple beautiful summers.

The book was a huge hit, and the eight-episode streaming series was released in late June of this year.

Filming during Canadian spring was “freaking freezing,” said Ms. Lockhart. The second the cameras turned off, actors would change from bikinis into parkas and boots, and they only ever went into the real water up to their ankles.

Ms. Lockhart was an executive producer for the series and wrote the eighth and final episode. But the TV show is “its own separate piece of art” for readers, she said, and also for the author herself. Besides collaborating with showrunners, actors and costume designers, the writer’s room for the show included “a variety of voices of Indian descent” to flesh out the characters of Gat and Ed.

Also of Indian descent, the characters are “outsiders” to the “white, old money Democrats” who make up the Sinclair family. They are often the center of tension within the family, especially in the show.

“I feel like the show is a lot richer than the book is in that way, and I’m really happy with that,” Ms. Lockhart said.

Ms. Lockhart’s earliest memories of the Vineyard are from the 1970s, when her grandfather was building a house in Chilmark. She recalls sleeping on cots with her cousins in the wall-less frame of a half-built house. Later, after her grandmother had planted a garden, the kids would stuff raspberries in their mouths, or pick and shuck corn for dinner, she said.

She still spends at least a few weeks each summer in that same house with her family.

“I’ve been going here long enough to remember when the West Tisbury Library was on Music street in a tiny little house,” Ms. Lockhart said.

“Those summers and the summers I’ve had here as an adult — and as a parent — have been just very rich for my imagination,” she added.

Her upcoming novel, We Fell Apart, was inspired by a Vineyard property, a Chilmark house designed by brutalist architect Araldo Cossutta. When Ms. Lockhart first visited the property, the castle-like house with four towers was in disrepair.

“It was so incredible and unusual, and I wrote a novel about it, basically — highly, highly fictionalized,” she said. “I moved the property to South Road because I wanted it to have beachfront access for my story purposes. Yes, it makes a better story when you have beachfront access.”

The novel, set to be released in November, follows 18-year-old Matilda to Ms. Lockhart’s version of the property to meet its owner and her estranged father, a famous painter. But instead of her father, she finds three “super cute” teenage boys living there, including her half-brother and a boy she eventually falls in love with.

“I had a really good time trying to lean into the intensity of a first love that is also fraught,” said Ms. Lockhart. “He actually wants her to leave that [property] and he’s holding some big secrets back from her.”

Set in the same world and web of lies as We Were Liars, the novel’s protagonist spends the summer on the secluded Vineyard property, sunbathing, clamming, lightly trespassing and of course, unveiling secrets.

Vineyarders might recognize versions of Island locales in the upcoming novel — chickens at the Grey Barn and Farm, burritos at the Scottish Bakehouse and Menemsha Beach.

“I think I was looking with this novel, maybe more than in We Were Liars and Family of Liars, to capture up-Island,” said Ms. Lockhart.

Outside of summers,Ms. Lockhart grew up in Massachusetts and Washington, conscious from a young age of having “one foot in and one foot out of worlds of entitlement and privilege,” she said.

“I grew up raised by a single mother, living for most of my childhood in communal living situations,” Ms. Lockhart said. “But I was a scholarship kid at some very fancy educational institutions.”

One of those institutions was Columbia University, where she received her PhD in English literature in the 1990s. At the time, she said, it was still “a very cemented old boys network.”

“I think I’m always thinking about that experience and it can be seen in my novels in a lot of different ways,” said Ms. Lockhart.

In We Were Liars, for example, Gat Patil is the character who both loves and questions the privileged environment into which he is not completely accepted, said Ms. Lockhart. In We Fell Apart, it’s the main character Matilda who is the outsider.

“She arrives to what is essentially a beachside castle with a whole lot of rules, and she loves it, and she questions it, and she loves it and she questions it, and she has to reconcile that same problem,” said Ms. Lockhart. “That’s certainly how I felt, for example, about Columbia.”

Other traces of Ms. Lockhart’s degree in literature show up in her novels, which are shaped by classics like Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare. In fact, teachers often use her novels in conversation with these older texts, Ms. Lockhart said.

But even with her background in the Western literary canon, Ms. Jenkins believes in a place for young adult literature throughout primary and higher education — both inside and outside of the classroom.

“I think that joy of reading is not at all a bad focus for us to have,” she said. “If people want to be reading romantasy, if they want to be reading Batman comics, if they want to be reading — I don’t know, whatever, I don’t care what they’re reading. If they love to read, they should read it.”

We Were Liars, the novel, is available for purchase at Island bookstores. We Were Liars, the series, is streaming now on Amazon Prime. We Fell Apart will be published in November.