Marcus spends his days busying himself with errands and watching over the sea turtle eggs expected to hatch soon. But the highlight of each day is his trip to Grief Cottage, a home abandoned and left to ruin following a hurricane years earlier. Marcus, in the midst of grieving his mother and acclimating to his new life, is drawn to a presence there. He sees a young boy inside the cottage and innately understands theirs is a fragile and unusual relationship, not to be shared with others.

Aunt Charlotte has been living alone for many years in a small renovated beach shack making a living painting the local landscapes, many featuring Grief Cottage, and selling them to wealthy patrons. Her solitary life is jarred when Marcus arrives and her complicated history creeps into her present. She fights to keep the memories at bay, retreating to her studio with bottles of wine for hours every day.

As Marcus meets more people on the island, clues about the boy at Grief Cottage surface and his interest in connecting with the boy intensifies. At the same time, while unpacking mundane remnants of his past from cardboard boxes, he is unearthing the life his mother led with and without him. Every person in Marcus’s world has secrets, and his connection to the boy at Grief Cottage is one of his own.

Marcus’s introspective nature illuminates the themes Godwin beautifully explores in GRIEF COTTAGE — grief, remorse, and memory.

“The reason we can’t pick you up and carry you is because you need to do the walk yourselves so you can smell the sand and remember your way back to this beach when you’ve grown up,” Marcus informs the soon-to-be-hatched sea turtles. Much like the ghost boy who finds himself back at Grief Cottage, Marcus, too, must find a way to forge a path forward while holding on to his past.

GAIL GODWIN is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the bestselling author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books, including the memoir Publishing and the novels Flora, Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and Evensong. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

www.gailgodwin.com

Wednesday, June 14 at 7pm.

Malaprop’s Bookstore/Café

In conversation with Rob Neufeld, author and historian