Forty years after the night the light failed at Ketch Head, the keeper's daughter comes back to bury her mother — and finds that everyone on the island remembers a version of that night she was never in.
They can be read in any order. Readers who want the island first should start with The Winter Ferry; readers who want the water should start with Every Tide Returns.
A keeper's daughter returns to Ketch Head for a funeral and stays for the discrepancy.
Or ask your library to hold you a copy.
A summer rental, a locked north wing, and a landlord who answers every question but one.
Two sisters run a sixty-year-old scallop licence and disagree, finally, about what it is for.
Off-season, the boat runs twice a day. A woman takes the second one and does not come back.
The ferry to Ketch Head runs on a schedule that has not been printed in eleven years. You learn it from someone, or you wait. I waited, which is how the island knew I was coming before the boat did.
My mother kept the light for thirty-one years and left the log in the drawer where she had always kept it, ruled and dated and honest to the minute. October the ninth, 1986: Wind NE 40. Lamp out 11:04 pm. Lamp restored 11:52 pm. Forty-eight minutes, in her hand, in ink.
Everyone on the island will tell you the light never went out that night. They will tell you kindly, the way you correct a child about a dream. And they have been telling it so long, and so gently, and so exactly the same, that I have started to understand it is not a memory they are protecting.
Nobody asked to see the log. That was the first thing I noticed, and the thing I could not stop noticing: in a place where everyone knows whose truck is parked where, and for how long, not one person had come up the hill in forty years to read what the keeper wrote.
I read it standing at her window, the way she would have. Forty-eight minutes is a long time to be dark. It is long enough for a boat to come in without being seen, and long enough for an island to decide what it did not see.
North of the Light · chapter one
All events are free unless the host says otherwise. Booksellers and festival organisers can reach me through the address at the bottom of this page.
First reading from North of the Light, with questions afterwards.
On coastal towns after the visitors leave, and why that is when the books are set.
Four novelists on settings that remember things differently than the people in them.
Backlist copies available; bring your own from home if you would rather.
Chapter one of North of the Light, read in the season the island is quietest.
For groups reading any of the four. Bring the question nobody at your table could settle.
New dates go to the reader list first. Join it here.
“I grew up two islands over and I have never seen anybody get the off-season right. The ferry schedule alone. You did not make that up.”
“I finished The Cormorant House on a Tuesday and started it again on the Wednesday, which I have done twice in my life.”
“Our book group argued for two hours about the sisters and nobody changed their mind. Best meeting we have had.”
I write about the Down East coast in the months when nobody photographs it. Before the first novel I spent nine years as a marine insurance adjuster, which is a job that consists almost entirely of listening to four people describe the same afternoon.
Four books so far: The Winter Ferry, Every Tide Returns, The Cormorant House, and North of the Light, which is out now. I live in Stonington with a bad dog and a good stove.
I answer reader mail, slowly and eventually, and I read every letter that arrives.
A note when a book is finished, a note when it is out, and the tour dates once they are real. That is the whole list.
No forwarding, no sharing, and one line at the bottom of every letter that takes you off it.