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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Propulsive . . . An absorbing look at small-town Maine and the thwarted dreams of a family trying to transcend it.”—Lee Cole, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “I tore through the saga of the Thatch family in two nights. The Midcoast is a reader’s dream—tense, ominous, and deeply wise.”—David Benioff, co-creator of Game of Thrones Finalist for the New England Society Book Award • A CrimeReads Best Book of the Year It’s spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch’s sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph, a decent student until she dropped out to start a family, would ever send a daughter to a place like Amherst. But so the tides have turned, and Andrew’s trying hard to admire, more than envy, the view from Ed’s rolling backyard meadow.
As Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house, he stumbles upon a file he’s not supposed to see: photos of a torched body in a burned-out sedan. And when a line of state police cruisers crashes the Thatches’ reception an hour later, Andrew and his neighbors finally begin to see the truth behind Ed and Steph’s remarkable rise. Soon the newspapers are running headlines about the Thatches, and Andrew’s poring over his memories, trying to piece together the story of a family he thought he knew. A propulsive drama that cares as deeply about its characters as it does about the crimes they commit, The Midcoast explores the machinations of privilege, the dark recesses of the American dream, and the lies we tell as we try, at all costs, to protect the ones we love.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Propulsive . . . An absorbing look at small-town Maine and the thwarted dreams of a family trying to transcend it.”—Lee Cole, The New York Times (Editors’ Choice) “I tore through the saga of the Thatch family in two nights. The Midcoast is a reader’s dream—tense, ominous, and deeply wise.”—David Benioff, co-creator of Game of Thrones Finalist for the New England Society Book Award • A CrimeReads Best Book of the Year It’s spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch’s sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph, a decent student until she dropped out to start a family, would ever send a daughter to a place like Amherst. But so the tides have turned, and Andrew’s trying hard to admire, more than envy, the view from Ed’s rolling backyard meadow.
As Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house, he stumbles upon a file he’s not supposed to see: photos of a torched body in a burned-out sedan. And when a line of state police cruisers crashes the Thatches’ reception an hour later, Andrew and his neighbors finally begin to see the truth behind Ed and Steph’s remarkable rise. Soon the newspapers are running headlines about the Thatches, and Andrew’s poring over his memories, trying to piece together the story of a family he thought he knew. A propulsive drama that cares as deeply about its characters as it does about the crimes they commit, The Midcoast explores the machinations of privilege, the dark recesses of the American dream, and the lies we tell as we try, at all costs, to protect the ones we love.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
PROLOGUE
Back when I lived out of state, people always used to get excited when they found out where I was from. They didn’t meet all that many Mainers—I was like a moose descended from a log cabin, wandering their backyard, eating their shrimp—and wondered if I was from anywhere near the town where they’d gone to summer camp or cruised in their custom sloop. Sometimes I was, sometimes I wasn’t, but Maine is a large state with more coastline than California, I liked to point out, plenty of old gray villages like the one I grew up in, plenty of places to get lost or hide, especially when socked in by a heavy fog. Maybe they’d heard of Damariscotta if they’d ever taken a vacation to the Midcoast, but they tended to pronounce the name wrong and then ask what it meant, and I would say either River of Little Fishes in Abenaki or something Scottish, we weren’t really sure. If they asked what the town was known for, I would have said brick-making, then ice-shipping, then oysters and this one little gallery that sells lobster buoys painted to look like political figures, but this was all before Maeve and I moved back home and bought our coastal charmer with a view!, a listing so pyritic that its author, our realtor, met us at the door mid-apology and with a referral to a rodent removal service.
Before my return I was still telling that old joke, whenever I needed to explain where I was from, about the local who has to give directions to a visiting urbanite. “You can’t get the-yah from he-yah,” says the Mainer, which tells you a little about the roads and highways on the Midcoast, a little more about the shotgun wariness that’ll greet you on so many overgrown front porches, and a lot about the granite breakwalls between those who’ve been here for generations and those who’ve landed more recently, within the past century or two. I am one of these newer arrivals, not a true Mainer—if your parents are from elsewhere, you don’t count, even if you moved to town at age three—but at least I’m not a tourist. We all scowl at the tourists. They ascend as one big traffic jam every summer and presume to know the place just because they’ve rented a cottage with bunk beds and weathered a gentle nor’easter. The other day I saw a couple in matching sunglasses lingering in front of the Sotheby’s, gazing at a flyer full of homes, one of which belonged to the Thatches, our town’s wealthiest family; when I overheard them indulging in the fantasy of moving here year-round, imagining Maine as the way life should be, I found myself wishing I had some other flyer with pictures of the peeling shack Ed Thatch lived in as a child, or the trailer he and his wife Steph moved into when they were only eighteen (or our own drafty ranch, for that matter), just to show these dreamers what they might find if they ever arrived in the off-season and ventured down the wrong dirt road.
To move on from any of these dirt roads was supposed to be impossible, but then the Thatches did just that, moved from there to here—well past here, actually. Steph loved to remind us of their early days, all the hard work and long hours that had put them on this different track, and it’s not that we didn’t believe her, just that we’d heard it all before, heard it plenty. But every small town has its own running dramas, its own local celebrities (there’s a set of twins that’s been calling our high school basketball games since the big playoff run in ’89, and there’s a mussel farmer who...
Reviews-
April 25, 2022 A man returns to his small Maine hometown and unravels the dark truth behind its wealthiest family in White’s alluring debut. As a teenager, Andrew worked summers as a dockhand with lobsterman Ed Thatch while dreaming of escaping for school and a new life. But after settling with his wife and two young children in Boston, Andrew decides to move back, thinking it would be cheaper for the family on his teacher and lacrosse coach’s salary. Now, while attending an elaborate reception for the Amherst College lacrosse team at the Thatch home (Ed’s daughter is on the team), he can’t reconcile the new Ed—the town’s wealthy benefactor and owner of several lobster boats—with the humble Ed he knew on the docks. During the party, Andrew finds a folder with photos of a burned-out car and two dead bodies. Stunned, he goes outside, where police cars speed up the driveway. White keeps the nonlinear story on a low boil, gradually hinting at Andrew’s motivation for investigating Ed and the details of his findings, which point to a hidden world of larceny and drug trafficking. An intriguing portrait emerges of the Thatches, as Ed’s wife wishes he would get out of the criminal enterprise, which Ed built to give Steph “the life she deserves,” and their slippery slope ends at a violent conclusion. Readers will be hooked. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc.
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