" ... [our review] will not be able to capture the ferocious, astonishing experience of being inside this deceptively slim book ... a dramatic social novel, a successful entwining of people that comes to signify the Big Moment of history"

- San Francisco Chronicle

From the O. Henry Award-winning author of the story collection The Bostons; an exquisite first novel set at a disintegrating New England prep school.

It's 1968. The prestigious but cash-strapped Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God. With Cape Wilde engulfed by the social and political storms of integration, coeducation and the sexual revolution, God has confidently promised coeducation "over my dead body." And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.

What does it mean to be the First Girl?

Carolyn Cooke has written a ferociously intelligent, richly sensual novel about the lives of girls and women, the complicated desperation of daughters without fathers and the erosion of paternalistic power in an elite New England town on the cusp of radical social change. Remarkable for the precision of its language, the incandescence of its images, and the sly provocations of its moral and emotional predicaments, Daughters of the Revolution is a novel of exceptional force and beauty.

Please join us as we welcome Carolyn Cooke on Thursday, June 23 at 7pm.

"Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction from the author of the best-selling novel Commencement ... One of this year's most inviting summer novels" 

-The New York Times

- San Francisco Chronicle

The Kelleher family has been coming to Maine for sixty years. Their beachfront cottage,won on a barroom bet after the war, is a place where children run in packs, showers are taken outdoors, and threadbare sweaters are shared on chilly nights. It is also a place where cocktail hour follows morning mass, nosy grandchildren snoop in drawers, and ancient grudges simmer below the surface. As Maggie, Kathleen, and Anne Marie descend on Alice and the cottage, each woman brings her own baggage-a secret pregnancy, a terrible crush, and a deeply held resentment for misdeeds of the past.

By turns uproarious and achingly sad, Maine unveils the sibling rivalry, alcoholism, social climbing, and Catholic guilt at the center of one family, along with the abiding, often irrational love that keeps them coming back, every summer, to the family house, and to one another.

Please join us as we welcome J. Courtney Sullivan on Sunday, June 26 at 3pm.

Laura Harrington joined us last Sunday to share from Alice Bliss.

Alice Bliss - the15-year-old protagonist - her 8-year-old sister Ellie, mother Angie, and father Matt live in a close-knit suburb of Rochester.  This is a community where children go through all 12 years of school together, neighbors look out for each other, and it's not unusual to have extended family living in town.

When Matt is deployed to Iraq, the family members each deal with his absence in her own way;  Angie is in denial and cedes much of the responsibility of running the house to Alice; young Ellie writes daily letters to Matt, sharing the minutiae of her day. Alice wants thing to remain "just as they were" and sets to planning the garden that she and Matt have tended together for the past several years.

This is a coming-of-age story for Alice, who has to navigate the rough waters of her father's absence, her sometimes antagonistic relationship with her mother (Angie), and the aches and pains of adolescence, replete with frenemies and emerging feelings toward boys.

Gloucester-based author Laura Harrington is an award-winning playwright, lyricist, and librettist who teaches playwriting at MIT. The novel Alice Bliss grew from her one-woman musical titled Alice Unwrapped.

She read from three sections of the novel, which introduced us to the members of the Bliss family, and to Alice's friend, Henry, who she has known "since they were in utero" (as their mothers like to say).

After taking questions and signing copies of Alice Bliss for the audience, Laura Harrington graciously signed additional stock for our bookshop shelves.