For more than a hundred years, Apple Island off the coast of Maine has existed in two states. To its residents, immigrants and the descendants of the enslaved, it’s a haven for a self-supporting community of hardworking, close-knit families. To the mainlanders who deign to notice it at all, it’s a poor and squalid place indeed, a cesspit of inbreeding and miscegenation. When circumstance opens this Schrödinger’s box at last, these incompatible realities collapse; the ensuing storm of progress propels the people of the island into various uncertain futures. Pulitzer Prize-winner Paul Harding has based his novel on actual historical events, but his gift for character creation is all his own, as is his mastery of language. No reader can hope for more gorgeous prose than this.
—James, Madison Books, Seattle, WA
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