The Northern Reach
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A heart-wrenching first novel about the power of place and family ties, the weight of the stories we choose to tell, and the burden of those we hide
Frozen in grief after the loss of her son at sea, Edith Baines stares across the water at a schooner, under full sail yet motionless in the winter wind and surging tide of the Northern Reach. Edith seems to be hallucinating. Or is she? Edith’s boat-watch opens The Northern Reach, set in the coastal town of Wellbridge, Maine, where townspeople squeeze a living from the perilous bay or scrape by on the largesse of the summer folk and whatever they can cobble together, salvage, or grab.
At the center of town life is the Baines family, land-rich, cash-poor descendants of town founders, along with the ne’er-do-well Moody clan, the Martins of Skunk Pond, and the dirt farming, bootlegging Edgecombs. Over the course of the twentieth century, the families intersect, interact, and intermarry, grappling with secrets and prejudices that span generations, opening new wounds and reckoning with old ghosts.
W. S. Winslow's The Northern Reach is a breathtaking debut about the complexity of family, the cultural legacy of place, and the people and experiences that shape us.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Winslow's ambitious if overstuffed debut novel in stories traverses several generations of four intersecting families in Wellbridge, Maine. In the opener, "Mother Ship," set in 1977, matriarch Edith Baines watches a schooner from her window and reflects on the death of her husband and older son while lobstering the year before. During a visit from Margery, the wife of her surviving son, Edith expresses dismay that Margery's daughter has married into the Moody family, which she considers "the lowest of Wellbridge's no-'count families." In other stories, ghosts appear. "Striptease" portrays a woman dying of cancer who imagines her aunt in the car, and "Smoke Signals in the Aftertime" describes a dead woman hovering like smoke in her house to hear what her kids really think of her. In "Requiem (for the Unburied)," artist Susan Baines, granddaughter of Edith, returns to Wellbridge from Brooklyn in 2017, and covers an old painting of the family house in heavy strokes. Winslow dutifully captures a sense of place and has an ear for dry New England wit, but the large cast and shuffled snapshots across a broad timeline make this a bit unwieldy. In the end, the fractured form doesn't do justice to the material.