Returning To Shore

Her mother's third marriage is only hours old when all hope for Clare's fifteenth summer fades. Before she knows it, Clare is whisked away to some ancient cottage on a tiny marsh island on Cape Cod to spend the summer with her father?a man she hasn't seen since she was three. Clare's biological father barely talks, and when he does, he obsesses about endangered turtles. The first teenager Clare meets on the Cape confirms that her father is known as the town crazy person. But there's something undeniably magical about the marsh and the island?a connection to Clare?s past that runs deeper than memory. Even her father's beloved turtles hold unexpected surprises. As Clare's father begins to reveal more about himself and his own struggle, Clare's summer becomes less of an exile and more of a return.

A young detective diligently seeks answers to a crime that was committed over 21 years ago. As he progresses in solving the crime, he comes face-to-face with the paranormal and death itself transcends all time and space as he reaches into the past of a girl he has never met. Is her killer still out there lurking for someone else? "Chilling, yet spiritually inspirational, this unforgettable love story will leave an imprint on your heart and confirm most of what you have secretly believed about God and life in the hereafter." L. Foston, Author of The Magi Chronicles

Nancy Howard’s story combines love, betrayal, conspiracy, suffering, and survival with a cast of improbable characters: a respected church-going husband and his mistress, a group of unsavory criminals, and a millionaire businessman. The story opens with Nancy’s returning home from a church function on a Saturday night in 2012, and pulling into her garage. As she walks toward the door to her house, she suddenly faces an attacker who demands her purse and then shoots her in the head. Investigation of the shooting first reveals that Nancy’s husband, Frank, has been having a three-year affair. A few days later, detectives uncover links between her CPA husband and an unsavory criminal in East Texas, Billie Earl Johnson. The story becomes increasingly bizarre as evidence surfaces of a murder-for-hire conspiracy between Billie and Frank, known to Billie only by his first name, John.

“The longtime chronicler of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula . . . gives eloquent expression to death and the grieving process.” —Booklist Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a master . . . who makes the ordinary extraordinary, the unnamable unforgettable,” beloved author Jim Harrison returns with a masterpiece—a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and finding redemption in unlikely places. Donald is a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man slowly dying of Lou Gehrig’s Disease. His condition deteriorating, he realizes no one will be able to pass on to his children their family history once he is gone. He begins dictating to his wife, Cynthia, stories he has never shared with anyone as around him, his family struggles to lay him to rest with the same dignity with which he has lived. Over the course of the year following Donald’s death, his daughter begins studying Chippewa ideas of death for clues about her father’s religion, while Cynthia, bereft of the family she created to escape the malevolent influence of her own father, finds that redeeming the past is not a lost cause. Returning to Earth is a deeply moving book about origins and endings, making sense of loss, and living with honor for the dead. It is among the finest novels of Harrison’s long, storied career, and confirms his standing as one of the most important American writers. “A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison’s finest works.” —Library Journal

Describes how, in the summer of 1916, a lone great white shark headed for the New Jersey shoreline and a farming community eleven miles inland, attacking five people and igniting the most extensive shark hunt in history.

"Book club favorites, reader's guide"--Cover.

Seventeen-year-old Lyn, working in a reconstructed colonial settlement in Nova Scotia, suddenly finds herself transported back to 1744, when the French inhabitants are at war with England.

I could not write for many days. Write! I could not walk or eat or even talk except to moan and wish that I were home or dead or anywhere but here aboard this ship. Twelve-year-old Celia Snow regrets the day she convinced her parents to allow her to accompany them on her father's whaling expedition in 1856. She thought it would be exciting, exotic, and thoroughly grown-up. Instead, she is terribly seasick and, even worse, homesick. But what's done is done, and Celia knows she cannot expect to see her home on land again for several years. As the months go by, the excitement of the expedition turns the miserable voyage into a true adventure. On the day Celia sights her first whale and watches the boats row out to the hunt, she realizes that she will see and experience more aboard the Jupiter than most girls will in a lifetime. She will learn to navigate, and she will see the incredible beauty of the Sandwich Islands and feel the biting cold of the Arctic. Best of all, she will fall in love. While life aboard ship is not easy, Celia learns everything she can about being a captain's daughter. In her heart, though, she still dreams about the day she will return home again. But when disaster strikes, Celia must gather all her courage, strength, and newfound knowledge in one desperate attempt to salvage the expedition and the lives of those she loves. When we left New Bedford it was cold but clear, a fair wind, Papa said. Mother was in her cabin arranging things, but I wanted to be out on deck. I kept my eye on the sweet shoreline till it disappeared from me, bit by bit, till it was just a line. I held it there in my memory long after it was gone. Papa passed me his spyglass and through it I could see what had been lost before. Sometime in the world maybe there will be a spyglass so strong I could see not just New Bedford, but all the way back home, to you in Eastham, or even as far as our cousins in Salem, and beyond. Books for the Teen Age 2001 (NYPL)