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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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FELLOWSHIP POINT
Celebrated novelist Alice Elliott Dark returns with a triumphant and masterful story of a lifelong friendship tracing the shared histories of two very different women across the arc of the twentieth century.
When Agnes Lee receives her third cancer diagnosis at age eighty, she purposefully focuses on securing her legacy. For one, as a writer: though a celebrated children's book author, she has struggled to begin what she knows will be the final volume of her secret, pseudonymously written Franklin Girls novels. But even more consuming is her determination to find a way to permanently protect the land in Maine that holds Fellowship Point, a slice of majestic coast settled as a land trust by five like-minded Quaker families in the 1860s. Agnes is determined to dissolve generations-old family partnerships so that the land can serve as a nature sanctuary for the benefit of all. Long used to getting her way, Agnes is confident she can convince the two surviving shareholders - her lifelong best friend, Polly Wister, and her favorite nephew, Archie Lee.
Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of his own stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family life. When Agnes proposes her plan for Fellowship Point, Polly finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons. But what is it that Polly herself wants?
Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver arrives, set on convincing Agnes to write her memoirs. Soon long-buried memories and secrets will come to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.
Fellowship Point reads like a classic nineteenth-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but is entirely modern in the themes it explores: a deep and empathic interest in women's lives, the challenges of institutional sexism, the jagged edges of class difference and elitism that divide us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, the human reckoning with mortality and posterity. It is a masterful achievement from Alice Elliott Dark.
Alice Elliott Dark is the author Think of England and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story "In the Gloaming" was made into two films. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.
Polly Wister has led a different kind of life than Agnes: that of a well-off married woman with children, defined by her devotion to her husband, a philosophy professor with an inflated sense of his own stature. She exalts in creating beauty and harmony in her home, in her friendships, and in her family life. When Agnes proposes her plan for Fellowship Point, Polly finds her loyalties torn between the wishes of her best friend and the wishes of her three sons. But what is it that Polly herself wants?
Agnes's designs are further muddied when an enterprising young book editor named Maud Silver arrives, set on convincing Agnes to write her memoirs. Soon long-buried memories and secrets will come to light with far-reaching repercussions for all.
Fellowship Point reads like a classic nineteenth-century novel in its beautifully woven, multilayered narrative, but is entirely modern in the themes it explores: a deep and empathic interest in women's lives, the challenges of institutional sexism, the jagged edges of class difference and elitism that divide us, the struggle to protect the natural world, and, above all, the human reckoning with mortality and posterity. It is a masterful achievement from Alice Elliott Dark.
Alice Elliott Dark is the author Think of England and two collections of short stories, In The Gloaming and Naked to the Waist. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry: Prize Stories, among others. Her award-winning story "In the Gloaming" was made into two films. Dark is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Rutgers-Newark in the MFA program.
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Published 2022-07-05 by MarySue Rucci Books |