A Novel.
'Isobel knew as she spoke that the doctor would misunderstand. She didn't want to go to her apartment, she wanted to go home again. To see Victor again, sauntering around a corner with a ridiculous paper flower. To sit in a rocking canoe, shielding her eyes from the sun to glimpse lovers strolling on a shore, bending to reach for the same stone. To settle on her work stool and choose something lovely for a brim. To be back in her old garden, washing Louisa's hair under the shade of trees long fallen. To rest.'
'These Granite Islands' is about a woman who, on her deathbed, recalls a fateful summer of 1936, a summer that forever changed her life. Isobel has been wife, mother, hatmaker. At the end of her long life she is simply herself, with one last story to tell her only surviving child.
Picking up the threads of a mystery that has shadowed her for sixty years, Isobel recalls her brief but unforgettable friendship with an extraordinary woman. That one long-ago summer becomes the prism to refract the essence of Isobel's life as she tells how she became witness to a passionate and dangerous love affair that tested her loyalty and her definitions of what is proper. When the summer dissolved in a haunting tragedy, Isobel was left to assess her future, her own marriage and, finally, to understand the risk of loving someone wholly.
An intimate and gripping story of friendship, marriage and the tragedy of loss, this is a true literary page-turner.
