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Margreete's Harbor
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
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Margreete's Harbor
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Summary
A literary novel set on the coast of Maine during the 1960s, tracing the life of a family and its matriarch as they negotiate sharing a home.
Eleanor Morse's Margreete’s Harbor begins with a fire: A fiercely-independent, thrice-widowed woman living on her own in a rambling house near the Maine coast forgets a hot pan on the stovetop, and nearly burns her place down.
When Margreete Bright calls her daughter Liddie to confess, Liddie realizes that her mother can no longer live alone. She, her husband Harry, and their children Eva and Bernie move from a settled life in Michigan across the country to Margreete’s isolated home, and begin a new life.
Margreete’s Harbor tells the story of 10 years in the history of a family: a novel of small moments, intimate betrayals, arrivals and disappearances that coincide with America during the late 1950s through the turbulent 1960s. Liddie, a professional cellist, struggles to find space for her music in a marriage that increasingly confines her; Harry’s critical approach to the growing war in Vietnam endangers his new position as a high school history teacher; Bernie and Eva begin to find their own identities as young adults; and Margreete slowly descends into a private world of memories, even as she comes to find a larger purpose in them.
This beautiful novel - attuned to the seasons of nature, the internal dynamics of a family, and a nation torn by its contradicting ideals - reveals the largest meanings in the smallest and most secret moments of life. Listeners of Elizabeth Strout, Alice Munro, and Anne Tyler will find themselves at home in Margreete’s Harbor.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
"Full of love, triumph and a boatload of heartbreak, Margreete’s Harbor is a celebration of life’s inevitable messiness. As after any good visit with family or dear friends, you will leave feeling satisfied while yearning for more." (BookPage)
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Critic reviews
"I was held spellbound by the brilliance and beauty of Margreete's Harbor. The family, the children, the music, the pets, the senile grandmother, the idealistic father, still live in Maine, in my heart and mind, like all the very best novels we are given to treasure." (Nancy Thayer, best-selling author of Girls of Summer)
"Margreete's Harbor is a novel that embraces your neighborhood, then the people who live on the other side of the world; then you. It cradles us all and shakes us awake. If you don't want to feel your heart expand or to live a bit closer to your own bones, don’t read this book. If you want to feel more, to understand more than you felt and thought yesterday, start reading and don’t stop." (Sena Jeter Naslund, best-selling author of Ahab's Wife)
"Margreete's Harbor breaks and mends the heart in the way of all great literature. It’s a collective story, roaring with love in the little moments. Profound revelations about relationships, emotions, and life in general. Descriptions of land, place, animals, and the natural world: some of the best I've ever read. The narrative moves with power, grace, and vivid music through history and the characters simultaneously - and differently. The people Morse writes are so real that I wouldn’t be surprised to meet them on the street." (Neela Vaswani, author of Where the Long Grass Bends)