Outermark — Jason Brown

A masterful work, catapulting the reader through the intricate history of Outermark with a sense of immersion that is rare in contemporary fiction. Full of quiet grace, breathtaking moments of violence, splendor, and all manners of beauty, this novel is an indelible achievement—and not to be missed.—Nathan Harris, author of The Sweetness of WaterOutermark is a haunting and bittersweet story about the power of the places that shape us from Jason Brown, winner of the Maine Book Award, a pure and accomplished talent (New York Times).The tiny, fictional island of Outermark sits thirty miles off the coast in the waters between Maine and Nova Scotia. When Corson Wills, one of the last people to have lived on the island, is asked to recount its history, he begins by describing it as a rock in the ocean where no one lives anymore. Corson's tale, and those of his ancestors who also lived there, ferry the reader between the 1980s, when lobster fishing is the only remaining industry, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, days of great sailing ships to the East Indies but also of conflicts between the earliest Native residents and newly arrived colonial settlers.During Corson's boyhood, life on the island becomes increasingly tenuous as the lobster stocks decline and debt and hard feelings abound. Some of the islanders have started to run drugs, and many others have abandoned their homes to move to the mainland. Tensions between neighbors reach a tipping point the night of a catastrophic house fire. Residents of Outermark suffer the loss of livelihood and community that many in small towns have experienced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the stories in Outermark reveal, as impossible as life was on the island, life off of it never feels quite right for those who had no choice but to leave it behind.