A Novel.
In a small town called Dundee on the coast of Maine, an old woman named Hannah Gray begins her story: "Somebody said "true love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about, and few have seen." I've seen both, and I don't know how to tell you which is worse."
Hannah has decided, finally, to leave a record of the passionate and anguished long-ago summer in Dundee when she met Conary Crocker, the town bad boy and the love of her life. First love often brings astonishment, joy, and frustration, but theirs is somehow also mixed with something frightening. Hannah discovers, as Conary and the others in the town already suspected, that a very unquiet and angry spirit inhabits the house that Hannah's stepmother has rented for the summer.
This spare, piercing, and unforgettable novel bridges two centuries and two intense love stories as Hannah and Conary's fate is interwoven with the tale of a marriage that took place in Dundee a hundred years earlier. Hannah says, "I don't suppose you have to believe in ghosts to know that we are all haunted, all of us, by things we can see and feel and guess at, and many more things that we can't." But she knows that ghosts are utterly real as well as metaphoric and is haunted by the sense that if she could have learned who this ghosts was, and what it wanted, it might have made a difference.
Ghosts haunt places where they have been deeply happy or intensely bitter in life. But this one's places have been disturbed. The house where it is seen was no one's home; it was first a schoolhouse, and originally stood not in Dundee but in an island village now abandoned and lost. What happened in that place, to a family trapped in a murderous pattern that seems to echo eerily through time, becomes the questions that haunts Hannah and Conary and will keep you guessing until the last, chilling page.
