Part bildungsroman, part ghost story, the 78,000 word novel takes its title from a destination where Cape Cod summerers might pass a day swimming or sailing. But to the weather-beaten inhabitants of the folklore-steeped fishing village of Chatham, Oyster Pond has a more chilling significance. 

Set in a wild and ethereal Cape Cod, Oyster Pond is an intergenerational family saga true to the maritime history of the region. Oyster Pond is the story of adolescent Dinah Wall, the youngest member of one of Chatham’s oldest fishing families. Told by her adult self in pursuit of a deeper understanding of her father’s suicide, the retrospective narrative of his final years is interwoven with stories from Donnie’s own childhood and the family legend of the great whaler who cursed his descendants to drown.

Still living in the original Wall home, the working-class family is plunging into that curse. Dinah’s mother Shannon is hellbent on making things right with hot meals and housekeeping. Dinah’s Auntie Carol, is Chatham’s first female fishing captain and a widow who tends the garden in wintertime. Donnie, Dinah’s father, renovates Cape Codders by day but can’t sleep at night. The story unfolds as Auntie Carol unofficially adopts Sean, a popular but troubled boy a year ahead of Dinah. Over the course of the novel, Dinah’s relationship with Sean comes to anchor her, while her relationship with her father decays into a reverberation of abuse and trauma.

It has the prose and story-telling of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and the story of young friendship like Mieko Kawakami’s Heaven and Yiyun Li’s Book Of Goose.